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PaulHostovsky.com
Welcome to the official site for information about Paul Hostovsky and his poetry.

Mostly by Paul Hostovsky Richard Jones has called it "exquisite storytelling by a first-rate raconteur, a book rich with poems that are funny, charming, and wise. Paul Hostovsky is so clever, so humorous—the reading is purest pleasure—that one must look again to savor and enjoy the formal delights of these well-wrought poems...a wonderful book to read, and then read again."

> Available for purchase here

Deaf & Blind by Paul Hostovsky "To read Paul Hostovsky... is to stumble upon something rare and wonderful. Hearing poets have been patronizing Deaf people and romanticizing silence since before the Elizabethan Age. In fact, [they] have indulged in sentimentality so often... that the English language itself poses an almost physical barrier against anyone attempting to write honestly about Deaf people and sign language. Hostovsky’s work is a study in shifting approaches; poems that are entertaining lessons (“Deaf Culture 101”), philosophical (“Poem in Sign Language”), personal (“Deaf Ex”) and portraits that are also parables (“Dracula’s Rat”). There is a wonderful honesty and freshness to his work."
—John Lee Clark

> Available for purchase here

Is That What That Is, by Paul Hostovsky"This new Hostovsky book is such a pleasure. Poems like "Repair" and "The Calculus" and "Deaf Bachelor Party" just knocked my socks off. Here's hoping it makes a big splash, as it certainly should. I thought I'd grasped that angsty, getting-older scene, yet never did I breathe its pure serene (apologies to Keats here) till Paul Hostovsky swam into my ken. Then felt I that all those other reliable reporters from the battlefield of being middle-aged in America-the Hoaglands and Hallidays, the Collinses and Padgetts- should step aside and make way for Hostovsky!" —George Bilgere

> Read three poems from Is That What That Is

Hurt Into Beauty by Paul Hostovsky

"In poems funny and wise, playful and sad, carnal and spiritual, locker-room casual and master-class artful, Paul Hostovsky names friends, enemies, writers, lovers, gentleman plumbers, and many others. In the process, he names the paradoxes and complexities that define us all. These poems “smile at you through the pain,” and you smile back in painful recognition. This book—maybe Hostovsky’s best yet—not only names names, it kicks ass." —Eric Nelson

> Read three poems from Naming Names

Hurt Into Beauty by Paul Hostovsky

"In his fourth full-length collection of poetry, Paul Hostovsky offers up the kind of fare that his readers keep coming back for--the humor mixed with poignancy, the heartbreak lined with a kind of palliative existential mischief--in poems that explore the nature of pain, illness, beauty, childhood, Deaf people and sign language, the art of love and the art of poetry." —FutureCycle Press

> Read three poems from Hurt Into Beauty

The Pushcart Prize XXXIIIPaul's poem "Dream" was selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXXIII.

> Click here to read "Dream."

Bending The Notes, by Paul Hostovsky"Paul Celan said that attentiveness is the common prayer of the human soul. Focus, the noticing of things not usually noticed, is a kind of prayer. Hostovsky's poems strike me as kinds of (non-religious) prayers—of joy, of grief, of praise, of pain, of a blind man reading a braille book with it closed on his hand, but mostly prayers as a form of gratitude, a kind of thank you, thank you, Life! This really is a wonderful book."
—Thomas Lux

> Read three poems from Bending the Notes

Dear Truth by Paul Hostovsky "Although the title poem is a sort of Dear John letter to Truth, the book itself is, in fact, dedicated to truth on a larger scale: the expansive and various truth of the imagination. In these touching, finely crafted, and often funny poems, Hostovsky remains true to his lively and inquisitive vision of the world, to beauty, joy, pain, and grief, always displaying a love of language that is contagious and invigorating."
—Jeffrey Harrison

> Read three poems from Dear Truth