D. A. Hosek

Category: publications

New poem: I Will Clean Your Basement in After Hours

This poem was vaguely inspired by some of the handwritten photocopied flyers seen taped to telephone poles and the like. Of course having written a poem in homage to this, I’ve decided to make my very own sheet that you too can download, print and tape to telephone poles in your very own neighborhood. The […]

New poem: Chicago Sonnet #44 in Milwaukee Avenue Messenger

Another of my Chicago Sonnet sequence. I was walking up Halsted from attending Mass at Our Lady of Mt Carmel on my way to a brunch at the St Francis Catholic Worker in Uptown and spotted a sign on the metal wall outside Sidetrack. Something about the sign reading, “Caution metal is hot” caught my […]

New poem in Hanging Loose: “Ekphrasis on a City Sidewalk”

This poem began life as the alt text on a picture I posted to Twitter back before Twitter turned evil. After I wrote the alt text, I realized that the alt text applied to itself and not just the picture and with a bit of editing turned into the poem that was published in Hanging Loose.  […]

New poem: Corpse in the mirror

Whenever I write an 8-line poem, I find myself wondering if it can be turned into a pantoum, a poetic form which takes 8-lines of poetry and twists them into something else. As a sort of deterministic randomizer, this sort of thing felt like a good fit for the Dada issue of Exacting Clam and the […]

“The boy who loved music”: The story behind the story

My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a […]

“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story

I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent […]

Three new poems: Jubilate Mammonæ, Museum of Broken Hearts and Carmen Philomelaicum

I have three poems in the Autumn 2025 issue (Volume 51, Number 2) of California Quarterly: Museum of Broken Hearts Jubilate Mammonæ Carmen Philomelaicum The last is a translation of a Latin poem by Eusebius of Toledo, my first published translation.¹ I had read somewhere once that translating poems was an important part of the […]

New poem: Chicago Sonnet #42

Another poem from my Chicago Sonnets sequence is out in the debut issue of Big Score Lit. Despite being #42, it’s actually the first poem in the sequence and the one that inspired the project.  There used to be a newsstand near the Adams station of the “L” in the loop and I was always intrigued […]

New poem: Parrotland

My poem Parrotland was just published at Dodging the Rain. Inspired by this Dinosaur Comics, I found myself wondering what America would be like if it were Parrotland and came up with the poem that I wrote.