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Writers Night In – Featured Reader Joshua Michael Stewart
December 1, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
OPEN MIC & FEATURED READER
Writers Night Out In!
Thursday, Dec 1, 2020 @ 7:00pm ONLINE.
We’re live and online! Join us Tuesday on Zoom at 7:00 pm for Writers Night In.
RSVP wno@strawdogwriters.org to receive the Zoom link to the event.
Only those who RSVP will be able to attend.
Ten names will be randomly selected.
The reading starts at 7:15, and each reader will have five minutes. General donations greatly appreciated for this event at http://strawdogwriters.org/fund-drive
Please join us!
FEATURED READER: Joshua Michael Stewart has published poems in the Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Plainsongs, Brilliant Corners, and many others. His books are, Break Every String, (Hedgerow Books, 2016) and, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, (Human Error Publishing, 2020). Connect with him at https://www.facebook.com/joshua.m.stewart.526
Bastard Children of Dharma Bums by Joshua Michael Stewart is a book of poems in two distinct parts. The first part is a series of thirty-four “sculpted” poems. The author explains these are erasure poems without the erased lines, using Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums. Stewart has chosen and crafted the words to make surprising imagery and beautiful poems, which stand well together and on their own. I enjoyed his delightful use of verbs, such as “jump a bottle of wine,” “surf the mountain” and “spend the warmth of God.” Some of these poems are rich with language, some are more sparse. #26 reminds me of early James Wright with, “A mischievous boy, I tried to talk / to the fancy ladies in lawn hats. / Having to smile real nice, I felt / like a dead crow.” I like the changeup of forms in both parts, from more modern/concrete work that creatively uses white space on the page, to golden shovels, to more traditionally lineated poems. In the second section of the book, entitled “The Hardest Path,” there is a strong influence of Japanese form. “Nature Lesson” and “Shelburne Fire Tower” are basically series of haibun. Several poems have a Kerouacian use of extended haiku. This is Stewart’s second book, and well worth adding to any quality poetry collection.
—Lori Desrosiers, author of Keeping Planes in the Air and other books from Salmon Poetry
