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Details
Paperback: 83 pages
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-209-5
Synopsis
"Paul Hostovsky has the storyteller's gift for character and voice. He has the lyricist's giftfor extracting the essential moment, holding it up like a crystal, and making it sing. He brings us into a world where beauty and pain reside together. From the shards of illness, addiction, and fractured love affairs, he meticulously crafts poems that are significant and durable."
--Diane Lockward
"Although the title poem is a sort of Dear John letter to Truth, the book itself is, in fact, dedicated to truth on a larger scale: the expansive and various truth of the imagination. In these touching, finely crafted, and often funny poems, Hostovsky remains true to his lively and inquisitive vision of the world, to beauty, joy, pain, and grief, always displaying a love of language that is contagious and invigorating."
--Jeffrey Harrison
Excerpt
Everyone Was Beautiful
The day that everyone was beautiful
was like any other day, the only difference
was that everyone was beautiful and the day itself
was a beautiful summer day or spring day or
one of those late winter days that smells like spring
and if it was fall it was early fall
when it?s all but technically summer and everyone
was simply beautiful, not sexy beautiful
or movie star beautiful or drop dead gorgeous beautiful,
but everyone but everyone had this patina
of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of
I think I knew you when we were children,
this look of I?ve loved you ever since you were born
and probably longer than that and it all started
with the paperboy careening out of the blue
dawn on his bicycle, pitching to the left and right
with his ballast of fifty today?s papers
in a vast canvas sack slung over his shoulder
balancing himself and the whole world
on the tip of morning, the streets beginning to stir
with shadows and workers and cars
all of which were perfectly beautiful,
and it continued on like that throughout the day
with the gas station attendant and toll collectors
and motorists and pedestrians and clerks--
even the boss, even the boss?s boss who always
seemed an ugly sort of fellow really, especially
on the inside. But on that day even the ugliness
was beautiful--it was a beautiful ugliness
the day that everyone was beautiful and the day itself
was a beautiful summer day.
History with a Smile
Rachel Ray has a beautiful smile,
I think to myself in the checkout line.
People have been smiling since Cro-Magnon,
I think to myself a little farther on
in the checkout line. It's hard to imagine
the bad teeth of the poor and the hungry
and the miserable throughout history
with Rachel Ray smiling at you in the checkout line.
But I think I would have liked history more
if Mrs. Manganelli, on the first day
in the 8th grade, had smiled a little like Rachel Ray,
simply panned the room with a shiny
timeless smile and said: "You know, children,
people have been smiling since Cro-Magnon."
I think that would have made a big impression on me.
I think the first assignment should have been
to smile, to look around the classroom at each other
smiling, and choose one smile
like a project or a special topic--divide up
into pairs and try to imagine
that smile occurring in a different century,
a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand
years ago, in a cave in France, or Pompeii
or Jerusalem or Alexandria or
Virginia. A line of sight, like a ray
beaming out from another time and place,
one person's smile shedding light
on everything. I think that would have gone a long way
toward our enlightenment. And maybe Bethany
Beauregard in the desk next to mine
with her aristocratic nose and prominent
gums and pointy eye-teeth flaring out
next to her impacted premolars
would have made the French Revolution come alive for me
in a way it never did, because Mrs. Manganelli
never smiled, and the first assignment wasn't
any more or less than the first two chapters
in a used world history book with only the occasional
gray engraving of someone or other
in a long line of dead people, not smiling.
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