Reviews of Out of the Woods



"Bolt writes with a deadly, stiletto-sharp focus and with a passion that is not only believable, but enticing and contagious."

—Booklist


"...his strange poems strike chords in the reader."

—Publishers Weekly


"...a startlingly evocative pastoral. ...Bolt sets his tone, supports it magnificently, eloquently, as a modern day Frost stopping by an apocalyptic woods."

—Kliatt


"Bolt invents a kind of anti-pastoral...a grimly realistic version of rural Virginia wholly unlike the one found in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...a wrecked Eden of barbed wire, refrigerators, mattress springs, bottomless buckets, glass shards, paint cans, Clorox bottles, and old Pontiacs. Billing himself as a 'reporter of the unimportant,' he resurrects his junkyards and polluted streams by turning their intricately observed decay into the stuff of art. ...a distinguished addition to a most distinguished series."

—Library Journal


"Vivid...psychologically engaging...the entire metaphorical field is so rich that the plainest words...vibrate from the start with human overtones."

—James Merrill,
Foreword to Out of the Woods