rebel/blonde, by Meghann Boltz

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Press.

rebel/blonde is Virginia Woolf's Orlando by way of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. As an exploration into the performativity of gender, it is also an attempt to question the notion of a fixed self. At its core is death, sex, and disappointment. It reverberates with the peroxide hum of existential loneliness; a hymn to a longing that is never satisfied and never goes away.

Meghann Boltz is a poet living in Buffalo, NY. She recently completed an MA in Creative Writing: Poetry at the University of East Anglia and her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Peach Mag, glitterMOB, Bad Pony, Lor, and Dream Pop. rebel/blonde is her first chapbook.

"These poems are tender little punks that speak precisely to how beautiful and terrible living is. Meghann Boltz makes me feel drunk on the world, on its ordinary opulence and excesses. A stunning book!"

-Sophie Robinson

"The speaker in rebel/blonde is the becoming of that which can be imagined, but never apprehended, as concrete as phantasia, the passed-off shapeshifter. Assertive, helpless, powerful: a neon demon whose confessions stream like the traffic down Sunset Blvd. In rebel/blonde, Meghann Boltz has given deranged pleasure to the task of outlining that which cannot be outlined, that identity which is not one, but a crowd unto itself, deranged as une chanson of pepsi and coke, the "I" that cuts a lock of hair from their mother's head straight out of the casket."

-Ben Fama

"As in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, rebel/blonde mixes a brew of filmstar gossip and what we used to call "gender confusion" to magical ends. Meghann Boltz plays that slash mark between "rebel" and "blonde" like a great conductor or math genius--it twitches, it divides, it clings and cleaves and fractals, bringing together a great chorus of "I want," and diminuendo, a whisper of "I used to be desperate." Not since I encountered the work of Kay Gabriel and Lourdes Figueroa have I been so taken by a poet new to me, nor one as ready and able to take on the stars and the planets."

-Kevin Killian

"Meghann Boltz's poems reveal with ease how the smallest puddle reflects all stars. I love this book, it sweeps me away every time I go to it."

-CA Conrad

Meghann Boltz is a poet and author of the chapbook Cautionary Tale (b l u s h, 2021) and microchap Roleplay (Ghost City Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, PeachMag, GlitterMOB, Voicemail Poems, Shitwonder, Maudlin House, and elsewhere, and has recently been anthologized in Erase the Patriarchy: An Anthology of Erasure Poetry (University of Hell Press, 2020). She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. You can find her on instagram @meghann__boltz.