“I feel like a rabbit in a coyote colony”
– Hilary Peach
Suggested listening:
John Prine
“The Hobo Song”
Originally published on Instagram
February 22, 2023
This a book cover I did on commission a while back. The book came out a couple of months ago, but the author — a fine Canadian poet who also happens to be a welder and a blacksmith — is launching it with a reading in her hometown tomorrow night, so I thought I’d post to coincide.
From the back cover:
“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.”
I’d go further. I’d say the book is also for anyone not especially curious about the unseen world of industrial construction. As with Michael Ondaatje classic novel In the Skin of a Lion (another industrial masterpiece by a Canadian master poet), the real construction here is the stuff of life. Not to mention:
“The best writers make readers interested in a subject they never imagined they might be compelled by…Peach takes the reader into a rarely seen world and we leave with new knowledge and respect, her style sparking as brightly as a welder’s torch, seaming disparate pieces of the universe together.”
— The British Columbia Review
Hilary Peach will read from Thick Skin on Thursday, February 23 at:
Hero’s Welcome
3917 Main Street
Vancouver, BC
7pm – 10pm
Thick Skin is available at Anvil Press here.
Please visit Instagram here to comment on this post.
Welcome to the Inkwell — a publication highlighting artwork, wordplay and idle thoughts from the House of Ink.
Thanks for stopping by!
If you enjoy the work you see here and would like to join the Inkwell community, please consider subscribing for email updates about future posts.
Subscriptions are 100% free.
That said, there are also paid options for patrons.
Paid monthly subscriptions cost about the same as a couple of cups of coffee – or a small bottle of India ink – and support from readers who wish to offer it is humbly accepted. Your contributions go a long way to help with the work. My gratitude.
Paying subscribers receive a free gift featuring a design of their choice after six months of subscription. Subscribers who sign up as Founding Members with a minimum contribution of $150 USD (or international equivalent) receive an additional welcome gift right from the get-go. A full range of gift choices will be emailed to new paid subscribers.
For the moment, the content here is more or less the same as it is on the Irreverent Ink Instagram page (albeit in a more reader-friendly format and with external links), but look for exclusive posts from time to time in the future.
Whether you’re here as a one-time visitor or a subscriber, thanks again and very best wishes!
Yours truly,
Ink
Unless otherwise specified, all content © by Ink. Collage art in this publication made exclusively with original and/or authorized material and/or images in the public domain.
Please report any broken links to irreverentink99@gmail.com. Thank you.