Birth Center in Corporate Woods

The poems in BJ Soloy’s Birth Center in Corporate Woods use long, contorting lines and elliptical connections to wade through the collisions of love, eros, loss, irony, pop culture, and late capitalism. From city to city and year to year, these poems trace landscapes personal, cultural, and physical as they--in turn--burn down before our eyes and then desperately, haltingly, try to return. At its galloping heart, BJ Soloy’s collection is an overheard intimate conversation. Sure, there are TVs and jukeboxes and increasingly frantic bickering jibes in the background--and the tour guide cinematographer is in a fugue state, dragging the reader from emergency room to hotel room, then behind the wheel of a limping Ford, then inside a dive bar, cradling an infant, writing a dirty letter, never quite falling asleep--but they eventually deliver us to a way station where honest elegy and Guy Fieri can not only coexist, but snuggle. Equal parts smartass deconstruction and living elegy, BJ Soloy’s latest collection is personal, risky, and ultimately very human.

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (2025, Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters (2016, New Michigan Press). From St. Louis, MO, he’s lived in Lawrence, KS, Chicago, Kansas City, and Missoula, MT. He’s taught at a load of places, mostly community colleges, and just saw a coyote this morning. With his partner, son, and too many domesticated familiars, he now lives and dies in Des Moines, IA, home of the Whatever.