An Introduction to Bernard Gershenson by Tiffany Troy


The speaker in Gershenson’s poems is at once a young boy and an older man reminiscing his adolescent past. He looks back at a time when all the world comes down to whether his father is coming home in the poem “It Was Then.” That clarity and music unfolds through the grief in trying to speak to “those whose hugs are buried within us” in “That Candle” and being “witnesses/ to the victims of a war/ though no one calls it by name” in “Las Vegas Slaughter, 2017.” 

Bernard Gershenson was at one time the Assistant Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State and later a professor of English at the College of San Mateo, from where he is now retired. He has published three books of poetry, the latest of which is Between Ice Ages (Heyeck Press). He also has an irregular blog, Aging Gracefully and Other Oxymorons. He lives in Oakland, California with the poet Paula Gocker, where on a given night they might hear owls or gun shots.