Joshua Michael Stewart

Joshua Michael Stewart's Vintage Gray ... reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Vintage GrayJoshua Michael StewartPudding House Publications
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Sometimes, his humor manifests itself in the whimsical, absurd and downright surreal, as in the sexual 'If I Had a Hammer...And Some Nails...Maybe Some Wood' and the prose poems (which seem to be a specialty of Stewart's) 'On Being Asked If I Believe in an Afterlife,' 'Beastly Nightwear' and 'One Rusty Bolt' about a mildly disgruntled airline attendant who fantasizes about dropping increasingly large objects from her company's 'rickety biplanes,' including Ford Explorers.
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There is something delightfully wide-eyed, genuine and even innocent about the way Stewart approaches the slippery aspects of being human in Vintage Gray - something Stewart shares with the Surrealists and Dadaists who appear to have inspired his work: indeed, it is no accident that one of Vintage Gray's best and most moving pieces is 'When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams,' which relates a dream-like encounter between (presumably) a Surrealist artist and a lover from whom he has been separated, possibly by his own cowardice.
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In this last poem, Stewart uses whimsy to give the speaker's emotional isolation and sexual obsessions an undertone of menace, and to illustrate the implication of violence.
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If Vintage Gray is any indication, Stewart is and will continue to be an important figure in 21st Century American poetry.
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Joshua Michael Stewart's ...