Poetry. The twelfth collection from poet Robert Hershon, CALLS FROM OUTSIDE THE WORLD, treats with equal ire the mundane and the ethereal, the monotonously present and the speculatively possible. "In the restaurant at the end of the world/ the waiters continue to serve/ and they still accept credit cards," he writes in one poem. "Bob Hershon's unsentimental eye for the touchingly odd, the amusingly odd, and the odd that needs correcting because it represents an important failure on the part of a person or a society is everywhere present in this terrific new book. Hershon is the Master of Brooklyn, Baseball, The Movies, Childhood, Restaurants, European Travel, and a lot besides. These funny, trenchant poems both enrich and ennoble our daily lives"--Charles North.