"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

Winner of the 2015 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize >

Paul's Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle in 2014.

"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

"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

Check out Paul's third book,
A Little in Love a Lot, here!

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

> Click here to read "Dream."

"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