Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood
Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking.
For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.
“This is a wonderful book – not just funny but a rare, insider’s look at the life of a travelling welder – the good, the bad, the ugly, and always, the fascinating. A collection of hilarious stories by a master (mistress?) of repartee, it is also an homage to the trade she loved.”
BOLT
The debut collection from west coast performance poet, Hilary Peach, BOLT ranges over familiar and unknown landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers’ Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, lacerating, songs of loss and longing, BOLT investigates rough terrain and long horizons. A compilation of poetry, performance scores, and autobiographical narratives, it is full of voices, places, fleeting encounters, animals, busted hearts, machinery, and extreme weather. Delicate portraits of birds muscle in on experimental text scores. Buffaloes thunder through the pages. Lovers are left weeping, factory stacks rear up against boiling skies, and coaltrains thread silently through clouds of fugitive dust. It is a collection of scars, and a compendium of remedies. BOLT is a measurement of lightening. 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.
“Bolt is so down to earth that the earth wriggles and shimmies for the sheer joy of it. Peach gives us the lives of transient workers, tangled in truck stops, motels, blood tests, shady cheque-cashers, and jokes about tattoos. Bolt is funny, moving, and above all full of nifty poetic swerves.”
“For ‘someone having trouble with belief,’ Hilary Peach in Bolt is wildly open to the world. Though times be desperate, she’s restless and alert in every moment, finding humour and pathos, serenity and continuity, and great rhythms. As long lone highways take her toward work and back again, she deftly verses conversations, people, and scenes. Her poems tap out the blues while she welds the boilers, and in her words a light glints with rough and ready tenderness and wisdom for us all.”