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, "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

Paul's newest book Dear Truth can be purchased from Main Street Rag. Click link to more information.

"Paul Hostovsky always finds a way to make me happy. I hope in the next life I come back as him."

—Scott Owens

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, and we have no choice but to read on. Dear Truth/ I do not love you./ I am running away/ with my beloved/ illusions... We run away with him to his difficult alluring country of paradox, pain and irony--and the unique existential mischief that relieves it all.

—Suzanne Berger