Paul Hostovsky is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently, Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and the Muriel Craft Bailey Award. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter.

Other poems by Paul Hostovsky in Verse Daily:
August 27, 2021:   "Face Mask" "Have you noticed..."
June 19, 2021:   "Dracula's Rat" "In the school play..."
October 19, 2017:   "Only Child" "In my one and only childhood..."
August 20, 2015:   "In the Home for Elderly Vehicular Manslaughterers by the Sea" "The guilt, like the sand, is in everything..."
September 18, 2014:   "That Light" "Everything is interesting..."
September 13, 2012:   "The Violence of Violins" "It was in them, they would say...."
October 13, 2011:   "Waiting Room" "The woman with the portable oxygen tank..."
March 2, 2007:   "Dusk Outside the Braille Press" "The lights go on in all the windows but one...."
February 14, 2007:   "Love Poem" "I love this poem...."
July 15, 2006:   "Picture of a House" " There are several V's in my daughter's drawing...."

Other poems on the web by Paul Hostovsky:
Six poems
Three poems
"Frieda"
Three poems
Two poems
"Sunday Morning"
"That"
"Driving to Work with Britney Spears"
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Love Letter to Carl Sandburg"
Five poems
Three poems
"Deaf Bachelor Party"
"Boxy Poem for Mr. Beck"
Seven poems
Three poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Opera"
Two poems
"One-and-Twenty"
"Go Children Slow"
"Throwing Snowballs at Cars"
Nine poems
"Sestina"
Four poems
"The Soul's Insistence"
Two poems
Three poems
"Italian Cuisine"
Two poems
"Peacock Patio"
Three poems
"God, Dan"
Five poems
"Poem for Michael Jackson"
"Work"
Two poems
"Caterpillar"

Paul Hostovsky's Website.

About Pitching for the Apostates:

"Pitching for the Apostates engineers a perfect circle within that metaphysical realm we call the poem. What initially appears and/or sounds conversational veers to verse in that its immediacy, its swift movement, is subtly arrested by humble expressions of revelation, due to the extraordinarily reverent care and exacting craft with which Hostovsky animates experience, making each poem with its perfect pitch a kind of medium of telepathy."
—Karl Elder

"Pitching for the Apostates feels like having an intimate conversation with a very close friend. Written in his seemingly effortless style, Hostovsky's poems disarm with their natural-sounding speaker's voice. 'Now I would rather remember life than live it,' he says in the opening poem, and remember life he does—in heartfelt poems full of bliss and sorrow, confusion and bemusement, spiced with plenty of humor and wordplay. By the time we get to the last poem, 'about the warm tears/of old men,/tears that bless everything,/help nothing, no one,' we know we do, in fact, need the help of many more poems from this compulsively readable poet."
—Peggy Landsman

"Hostovsky's trademark hospitable-with-a-sting style, his capacious invention, the ease of his craft, and his always rich humor are on full display in Pitching for the Apostates.His magpie mind is seemingly able to find a poem in anything—poems full of deepening turns and a restless resistance to the pat answer or any too-tidy closure, poems about their subjects and so much more than their subjects."
—David Graham

"Paul Hostovsky is our heartfelt story-teller poet, our risible raconteur of daily life, our faithful chronicler of 'So what happened next?' In this his thirteenth book of poetry, the overwhelming sense is of a poet in love with memory, and a poet in love with language, who keeps finding new ways of taking us with him by the hand and leading us back, putting us under the spell of his own personal Mnemosyne."
—Carl M. Jenks