Welcome to poet Paul Hostovsky's website

Advance praise for Paul's new book, Bending the Notes, coming in January 2009 from Main Street Rag, www.mainstreetrag.com, ""This book kicks ass. 'Bear with me I/ want to tell you/ something about/ happiness,' the first poem begins, and that urgency never lets up as Hostovsky tells us not only about happiness but also about sadness, pain, tenderness, making love, making sandwiches, making poems, making mistakes, and trying to 'make it/ right.' How many poems have you read in which an extended basketball metaphor appears side by side with Rilke's notion of beauty and terror; or in which a lesbian rabbi and recovering alcoholic priest hilariously discuss the relationship between profanity and prayer; or in which the phrase 'the shiny, poisonous leaves/ of Beauty' refers not to the common, three-leaved rash-inducing plant but to the pages of People magazine? They're all here, along with many other wonderful poems that are by turns funny and poignant--or both at once. Equally adept with fixed or not-so-fixed forms as with free-wheeling free verse, Hostovsky shows us, over and over, in language that is always alive, what it is like to be alive." --Jeffrey Harrison

Advance praise for Paul's new book, Bending the Notes, coming in January 2009 from Main Street Rag, www.mainstreetrag.com, "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

Now available Paul's book Dusk Outside The Braille Press can be purchased
from Riverstone a press for poetry. Click to read an excerpted poem.

Intelligent and poignant, these poems reveal the poet’s narrative bent, lyric grace, and technical mastery, most notably, an uncanny knack for the double-duty line break. In poem after poem, Hostovsky moves with ease from the literal to the metaphorical. His fascination with deafness, hands, and signing compels us to think about how we listen or don’t listen, how we touch or fail to touch each other, and what language really means.

—Diane Lockward