Review of Joshua Michael Stewart's chapbook “Vintage Gray”

I had the pleasure of reading Joshua Michael Stewart’s new chapbook “Vintage Gray.” This well-crafted little volume from Pudding House Press (2007) contains something for every discerning reader of poetry. On opening the book this reader was immediately struck with refreshingly original imagery. In the opening piece “A Covenant and a Busted Tooth” he writes I’m eating a slice of toast thin as an angelfish / and my coffee’s cold as a frog’s belly.
The poems continue to both amuse and astound. The reader soon discovers playful poems about punctuation, playing air guitar, and pajamas. Stewart also explores the more serious theme of death in “When the Surrealist No Longer Remembers His Dreams”(which is a surrealist gem), in “Ghosts” and the book’s penultimate poem “On Being Asked If I Believe in an Afterlife.” “Internal Bleeding” depicts an encounter with a deer where the hunted becomes the hunter. Nestled within the volume, almost hidden on page 23 of 32 is a scintillating little piece.called "If I Had a Hammer...and Some Nails...Maybe Some Wood." Is it about building a house or the tremulous stirrings of the beginning of a new love? I hope both.
If you give / the signal: blink your eyes or breathe, / I’d have an old borrowed machine idling, / coughing black smoke. It may not look like much / but this rusty heart’s a thundering juggernaut.
“Vintage Gray” is available from Pudding House Publishers http://www.puddinghouse.com/
Joshua Michael Stewart lives and writes in Ware, Massachusetts.

by Lori Desrosiers