"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
"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
"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
