The Bad Guys

Winner of the 2015 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Who are the bad guys, anyway? Which one is the good fight, anyway? In Paul Hostovsky’s eighth book of poetry, The Bad Guys, there are poems about suicide bombers and high school bullies, capricious exes and ecstatic bums, fastidious drug-dealers and contemplative alcoholics, evil stenches and spiritual moms; poems about the Republicans, the mega-hospitals, the brusque and bearded anesthesiologists, and the lady who gave out pencils on Halloween. Plus a host of other unlikely, often likable, always loveable, candidates. These poems are by turns funny and poignant, formal and free verse—a villanelle here, a pantoum there, and lots of loosey-goosey sonnets peppered throughout. Of Hostovsky’s poetry Thomas Lux has said: “Hostovsky’s poems strike me as kinds of non-religious prayers—of joy, of grief, of praise, of pain...but mostly prayers as a form of gratitude, a kind of thank you, thank you, Life!”