Robert Hershon

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Hershon is very much a poet of New York City, where he has lived all but a few years of what is now getting to be a long life. In his work, New York is always either the center of the world or the touchstone by which it is understood. Hershon does this with none of the air of cultural superiority that occasionally mars writing from the city, at least for some of us out here in the provinces. Rather, New York, and particularly his neighborhood in Brooklyn, is his window to the world. Calls from the Outside World ends with a short poem, "Locked":