Dear Truth is close kin to Paul Hostovsky's other work, but much here is concerned with physical pain, its etiology and its indescribability, its persistence in the psychic world too. But humor is always standing at the abyss with this poet--and enormous good will. Like Kunitz, he is a master at revealing tenderness; like Gerald Stern, his onrushing lines trap the reader in a tidal pull...we run away with him to his alluring difficult country of paradox, pain and irony--and the unique existential mischief that relieves it all. —Suzanne Berger