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, author of Alpha Images: Poems Selected and New

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, author of Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate

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, author of The Honey of Earth

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, Poetry Corner