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.

Paul Hostovsky: Selected Poems brings together 120 poems from this prolific, masterful, Pushcart Prize-winning poet's previous five collections of poetry, Bending the Notes (2008), Dear Truth (2009), A Little in Love a Lot (2011), Hurt Into Beauty (2012), and Naming Names (2014). Of Hostovsky's work the Georgia Review has written: "High-energy Paul Hostovsky, who makes his living as an interpreter for the Deaf, has been making a lot of noise in the poetry publishing world of late, with five full-length collections and six poetry chapbooks in the past eight years. He is best known for his use...

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...

In Medias Res: Stories from the In-Between is a collection of stories put together by Writespace, a Houston-based literary center. These stories focus on characters who are thrown into or stuck between different cultures, communities, families, races, genders, self-images, dimensions, or continents. They explore the gray area-the uncomfortable, the undefined. These are characters in the middle of it all: middle children, mediators, people in the middle of their lives, in the middle of a mess-"in-between."

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...