"Alliteration" by Paul Hostovsky

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

the Poet:

Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. His Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Almanac, has won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net Awards, and was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2013. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com 

the Poem:

This speaker’s voice is truly ecstatic, attuned so finely to the liveliness of the surrounding woods that he’s compelled to join it. It doesn’t even matter which season it actually was (in fact it was probably all of them at one time or another). All that matters is the feeling of complete release, of surrendering to one’s body so fully that you abandon your clothes, your speech… all the trappings of civilization. The poet is careful to arrange his syntax to mirror the crescendo of climax, so that as the vowels and then the consonants make their appearances we feel the arc as much as read it.

the Design:

Title & Name: 60pt & 36pt Garamond

Body: 14pt Mona Lisa Solid

Everything about this poem is standing at attention so the typeface for the body needed something with exaggerated ascenders and descenders. Mona Lisa delivers, its effect on the page a wood of its own. Pealing the body of the poem away from the left margin is as much for the sycamore’s bark as it is for the speaker’s remembered erection. To frame it all, the title and poet’s name are tree and ground, respectively. Garamond keeps them from becoming too stylized, too unusual to be true.

online ISSN: 2651-3801

"Poem on the Fridge" by Paul Hostovsky

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
Paul Hostovsky is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Naming Names (2013, Main Street Rag). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit 2013. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com.

The Poem:
Certainly the fridge door is a place of honor, but the “highest honor/ a poem can aspire to”? At first this reads like sarcasm. And the poem seems to take itself so seriously, giving a triumphant speech about its own achievement. It smacks of the self-important posture often assumed by art considered “high,” which is why we chuckle – the fridge is decidedly hodgepodge and common. But then the poem changes focus, “the song in its head” changing from the physical words “lined up here” to what they signify: “a dispensary of indispensable details” observed from surrounding life. Happily there is lots of food and a little medicine. Essential stuff is “seeping through this white door” as well as the white page that holds the words to the poem, alive and infectious.

The Design:
Title: 50pt Gabriola
Name: 36pt Gabriola
Body: 14pt Franchise by Weathersbee Type
This refrigerator poem is so proud, so honored to have that magnet “like a medal/ pinned to its lapel.” It stands very straight against the fridge’s fuselage, at attention like a general who has just been awarded his fourth star. The typeface for the body therefore needed a straight spine and squared shoulders; Franchise delivers, adding its distinctly medal-like colons for good measure. The title needed a bit more curve, something worthy of a personal invitation to “Stop here a moment/ and listen to the poem… It’s having a party.” The kind of script that might issue from the hand of a very upright, formal being trying to let down their hair a little: Gabriola.

online ISSN: 2651-3801