Perfect Disappearances

What a wonderful book! These poems have a warmth and unfussy plainspokenness that feels increasingly rare these days. They often feel more like short stories than poems, and yet they very much are poems. In a way, they get the best of both worlds: the ability to tell stories, while free of the constraints of prose fiction. The movement and gestures are lyrical, the pressures are the pressures of poems, with the same elastic ability to move through implication rather than plot.

-Joshua Mensch



Perfect Disappearances will make you laugh out loud. It will make you cry, too. In poetry I only have a few heroes, and Paul Hostovsky is all of them.

-Hal Crook



Beneath the wonderfully snarky voice in Perfect Disappearances lies a very romantic soul who captures the subtle nuances of life with wit, humor, pathos, and charm. The beauty of these poems is how they often feel like mini biographies, weaving stories that are compressed, sensual, alluring, provocative, lusty. Hostovsky's poems look like him.

-Judith Marks-White



Hostovsky's work is so damn good. I revisit it often. To be honest, it is a source of, not only admiration, but inspiration.

-Neil Carpathios