Birth Center in Corporate Woods

BJ Soloy' s Birth Center in Corporate Woods uses long, contorting lines and elliptical connections to wade through the collisions of love, eros, loss, irony, pop culture, and late capitalism in this personal, risky, and ultimately very human project that's equal parts smartass deconstruction and living elegy. 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, Birth Center in Corporate Woods 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, in 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. The mutable " I" changes clothes between sets (and sentences), but they' re dragging the same load, leaving none of us alone, even when we' re alone.