"One might enumerate all the ways in which Koch must have felt like an outsider — a Jew in the Ivy League, a Midwesterner in New York, a heterosexual in a homosexual coterie (the New York School) — but being a comic poet with a metaphysical bent in the postwar/Cold War/New Criticism era might have cut the deepest: not that he himself was on the outside, but that his poems were on the outside." Ange Mlinko • Poetry

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