Bolt

Poetry. BOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from twenty years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, BOLT investigates rough terrain and long horizons. A compilation of poetry, performance scores, and autobiography, it is full of voices, places, fleeting encounters, animals, busted hearts, machinery, and extreme weather. Delicate portraits of birds muscle in on experimental scripts. Buffalo thunder through the text. Lovers are left weeping, factory stacks rear up against boiling skies, and coal trains thread silently through clouds of fugitive dust. BOLT is a collection of scars and a compendium of remedies; a measurement of lightning. It's the familiar impulse that occasionally seizes us all, to suddenly run, out of control. But it's also a carefully engineered fastener that holds things together.