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MOSTLY is Paul Hostovsky’s twelfth book of poetry. Richard Jones has called it “exquisite storytelling by a first-rate raconteur, a book rich with poems that are funny, charming, and wise. Paul Hostovsky is so clever, so humorous—the reading is purest pleasure—that one must look again to savor and enjoy the formal delights of these well-wrought poems...a wonderful book to read, and then read again.”
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 13, 2021
It is always enjoyable to read Paul Hostovsky's poetry. Here is a link to his website so you too can read some samples:
http://www.paulhostovsky.com/
http://www.paulhostovsky.com/
April 5, 2021
We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:
LUCKIER
Praise the man
who lives on the corner of 109 and Lake
and hasn’t mowed his lawn
in years—
all those flowering weeds,
untamed shrubs,
hegemony of ivies
claiming that yard like
a promised land,
not to mention the grass
he has let grow so long
that the leaves—
the leaves of grass—
could hide the girth of a man
as large as Whitman
if he lay down there
and looked up at the clouds,
a blade of grass in his teeth.
I don’t know who he is
but I know the neighbors
are calling his yard an eyesore,
they’re calling it obscene—
the way Whitman,
the father of free verse,
was called obscene in his day
for his overt sensuality. But I say
praise the man with the sensual lawn,
the epic lawn going onward
and outward on the corner of Lake
and 109, praise his genius
for freedom, so American, so
ahead of its time, transcending
all the manicured, boxy work
of his unimaginative contemporaries.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
A platitude and a platypus
have one thing in common:
their first syllable,
which comes from the Greek
for flat. The resemblance
ends there. Because a platitude,
which is sometimes referred to
as a cliché, is nothing like
a platypus, which is sometimes referred to
as the duck-billed platypus.
Bill of a duck, tail of a beaver, feet
of an otter, the platypus
is no platitude. It’s an original—
the sole living representative
of its family and genus. Write
platypuses, undergraduates. Be
original, be surprising. Be the venomous
mammal that lays eggs, figuratively
speaking, whenever you write
or speak. Don’t be flat or trite
like a platitude. Be the flat-footed
platypus with a body so genuine
that early European scientists
thought it was a fake—several
animals sewn together. Don’t be all
you can be; be everything you aren’t.
Be sphinxian and alive for once
in your life. One page. Due Friday at 5.
LUCKIER
Praise the man
who lives on the corner of 109 and Lake
and hasn’t mowed his lawn
in years—
all those flowering weeds,
untamed shrubs,
hegemony of ivies
claiming that yard like
a promised land,
not to mention the grass
he has let grow so long
that the leaves—
the leaves of grass—
could hide the girth of a man
as large as Whitman
if he lay down there
and looked up at the clouds,
a blade of grass in his teeth.
I don’t know who he is
but I know the neighbors
are calling his yard an eyesore,
they’re calling it obscene—
the way Whitman,
the father of free verse,
was called obscene in his day
for his overt sensuality. But I say
praise the man with the sensual lawn,
the epic lawn going onward
and outward on the corner of Lake
and 109, praise his genius
for freedom, so American, so
ahead of its time, transcending
all the manicured, boxy work
of his unimaginative contemporaries.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
A platitude and a platypus
have one thing in common:
their first syllable,
which comes from the Greek
for flat. The resemblance
ends there. Because a platitude,
which is sometimes referred to
as a cliché, is nothing like
a platypus, which is sometimes referred to
as the duck-billed platypus.
Bill of a duck, tail of a beaver, feet
of an otter, the platypus
is no platitude. It’s an original—
the sole living representative
of its family and genus. Write
platypuses, undergraduates. Be
original, be surprising. Be the venomous
mammal that lays eggs, figuratively
speaking, whenever you write
or speak. Don’t be flat or trite
like a platitude. Be the flat-footed
platypus with a body so genuine
that early European scientists
thought it was a fake—several
animals sewn together. Don’t be all
you can be; be everything you aren’t.
Be sphinxian and alive for once
in your life. One page. Due Friday at 5.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews