Is That What That Is

In his ninth full-length collection, Paul Hostovsky serves up his usual unusual fare of graceful, musical, accessible language sauced with humor and tenderness in poems about love and sex, exes and whys, lost socks, lost erections, lost youth, deaf people and dentists and kazoos—with lots of ars poeticas sprinkled throughout and a philosophical cavy hopping into more than a couple of poems. These poems consistently extract from the everyday and ordinary experiences of our lives a kind of Holy Instant of joy, of insight, of wonder, and a sort of redemptive humor that leaves us somehow sadder and wiser AND happier the morrow morn. George Bilgere says of this new collection: “Such a pleasure. These poems knocked my socks off. 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!”