Hurt Into Beauty

by Paul Hostovsky

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 violence, illness, beauty, childhood, Deaf people and sign language, the art of love and the art of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published June 22, 2012

About the author

Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from the Comstock Review, and numerous chapbook contests. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Bad Guys (FutureCycle Press, 2015). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


FOLD THIS POEM IN HALF

Fold this poem in half.
Now fold it in half again,
and again. Notice how,
if you did it right, it fits
on an eighth of the page,
the way the moon fits
in the backseat window
of the car traveling through
the night, the road unfolding
like a story from childhood,
the white space surrounding
the poem collapsed like time
into this one moment reflected
in a little corner of the sky.


LIGHT BULB

“I wanna be an inventor
like Thomas Lava Edison,” he says,
erupting from the dinner table
and trailing a white dinner napkin

and leaving his untouched mashed potatoes
in the shape of a volcano,
the gravy cooling inside the crater
left by the beaked ladle.

After the chuckling dishwasher dies down
I press my ear to the door of his
laboratory, and I hear his small voice
asking questions and also

answering. Soon he reappears with
two toy cars, a red one and a blue,
parks them on the dining room table,
installs himself in a chair—my chair—

and bids me sit. The demonstration begins:
“I’ve invented a talking car horn, Dad.
With a menu. You choose from the things you always say
when people cut you off, or move too slow,

or don’t put on their blinkers. Only now
they’ll be able to hear you.” The cars start up:
VROOM, VROOM. The red one shouts:
“Come on, wake up, buddy. Sometime this

century would be nice.” The blue replies: “Relax,”
and turns left. The red continues straight: “Nice
turn signal, jerk.” He looks up at me with
eyes as big as headlights. “Would you

buy it?” he asks as the cars fly up
and out in opposite arcs above his head,
grind to a halt midair, upside down in his hands.