12 or 20 (second series) questions with B.J. Soloy

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). With stuff recently in places like Painted Bride Quarterly, At Length, and Gigantic Sequins, he teaches at a community college and a women's prison near Des Moines, Iowa, home of The Whatever.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Our Pornography & other disaster songs, came out into the world in 2019 and didn't immediately blow open all the locked doors or give me a backstage pass to the scene, but it did feel real good. I got the email letting me know it won the Slope Editions Book Prize on my  classroom computer in between classes at the community college where I was teaching outside of Kansas City. I mostly swallowed my joy and taught some stuff, but it was a big deal to me. Ocean Vuong, who selected the manuscript, wrote a really generous introduction and I got to do my official book release reading at a Rodney Dangerfield-themed bar in Portland, OR with some badass writers. So, even though the world shut down within a year, I call it a win. This second book, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, feels like it's on the other side of a fat gulf. In between the two, COVID hit, I had a kid, my partner's been transitioning, we moved to Des Moines, and that's all bled in--at least in roundabout ways--to the more recent work. Though the first book was ostensibly a book-length poem and this one has discrete pieces, the new stuff feels more cohesive. They both blend personal, capital, pop cultural, but Birth Center seems to show more breadth and accidental daring. Recency bias exists, but it still seems more like an album to me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I got my dead grandpa's old desk when I was, like, eleven, and it seemed wrong that it was empty. Its thin little skeletal drawers. I started writing little things on some notecards and keeping them in there, like newspaper people in movies with their papers and such. I mean, I have a desk. So I had this idea of being a writer early. I was mostly a sketcher, though, into high school, then it was almost a sort of synesthesia. I kept sketch diaries for years and years and image slowly gave way to words. My eyes retreated. A Shakespeare class in high school gave me the sonnets (at the time, I moved into our damp basement, acquired my best friend Josh's sister's yellow bed frame, and wrote Sonnet 60 on the side). When I started college as a visual artist, a class on attention introduced me to Schuyler. In my first poetry workshop at a now-extinct liberal arts school in St. Louis, I got Alan Dugan. Angie Estes and Kathy Fagan came and read at that school. The more I heard people writing about kicking rocks down the road or ducks walking into bars or trees as slo-mo explosions, the more my elliptical, faux song lyric, compulsive notes seemed like they might have family.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

3 (though I'm really answering 4 too). I try not to/can't successfully do projects™ very often. I've had a couple of exceptions with my first chapbook (a book of letters) and an elegy project for my dad, but mostly I can't compel myself to write to a theme or singular idea without boring myself into a torpor in an unpleasant way. I tried writing to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, but it was shitty. I invented a form, the Birdy-Lou, and tried to write a bunch, but it went flat fast. I'll probably keep challenging myself with projects and then swiftly failing, but about all of my work that, well, works slowly congeals. Scraps accumulate and I edit toward one poem. Poems accumulate and I start to pair them off. I rewrite by hand, over and over, forcing myself to see if it sticks. Eighty lines will whittle themselves down to eight and repeat. The eights add up and echoes start to emerge and after the bunches of poems turn to bunches of bunches, I'll print the whole mess off, spread it on the floor, and start editing for a manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings have become important to me. Maybe it's my experience as a musician and/or a teacher, but it feels more real, alive, fragile when received in person. My droll, boringly Midwestern voice is pretty close to my internalized narrator's, but the poems feel different. So, yes: I enjoy readings. And I enjoy reading with other people. Some folks I've read with many times; most I'm reading with for the first time. It's humbling and electric to be in a space and of a voice.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

As with subject matter, a lot of the theoretical concerns I surely use seep in without being explicitly invited. I've thought a lot about apostrophe and the construction of the mutable "I." The inherent postmodern distrust of clean meaning making is there. Werner Herzog's definition of poetry as "ecstatic truth" haunts them. As does a sense of the uncanny and the sublime, which I think can actually swallow the reflexive skepticism and turn it into something more generative. A cultural studies conflation of the high/low and the formal/informal (there all along in haiku, Eliot, Niedecker's amazing calendars) is a constant whisper.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I'm loath to make any broad proclamations about the role of anyone, but I'm tempted to think about comedians/fools and all that. Right now, though, especially in the Trump era and its clear goal of censorship through pre-compliance and the chilling effect aimed at media companies, law firms, institutions of higher education, etc., a writer's ability to tell it slant, (Write it!) like disaster, etc. can be a real call to action. Maybe we have less to lose (no one reads poetry), but there's a freedom in that. In teaching Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman's "Describing Tattoos to a Cop," Rankine's Just Us, or Valeria Lusielli's Lost Children Archive, I feel the writer's ability to both distill and complicate things (topics/events/humanity) that have become so watery and boringly, lucratively provocative in social media's sad realms.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

My editors have been blessedly hands-off, making sure the named people in my poems won't sue and going over consistency and sentence-level concerns, but they seem to trust that I've spent way too much time on every little phrase and punctuation choice to casually suggest reworking things to taste. I, honestly, love it when people come at my work, scalpels or flamethrowers in hand, but haven't had much wrasslin' from the presses.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Ed Roberson said lots of amazing things, but a throwaway line about finding good readers outside of school has turned out to be invaluable. I don't have the trading pages at a bar scene I did for years, but I find myself today with three pieces from friends awaiting some feedback and some pieces of my own to send away soon. I haven't been in a real workshop in—counts rings in trunk—thirteen years, but I know who I'll show my stuff to. Runner-up: "Never trust a man in a blue trench coat / Never drive a car when you're dead."

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

This is where I'm old. My son wakes me up at 5:45 - 6:05, throwing Slothy the sloth and Fluffy the stingray onto our bed. My writing used to be done chronically, if never on schedule, but now it's purely opportunistic, running trickles of lines until they pool. I occasionally get a schedule (stop by GT in Des Moines on Monday nights after teaching my prison evening class and work on edits for an hour), or a habit (I started spreading out on the floor by the record player at night when everyone else went to sleep), but I'm feeling the need to get official (I have a new challenge/drawing restraint/party with my pal and great poet, Philip Schaefer: we're to write one new line each day, starting next week).

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Honestly, sometimes it's so insultingly simple as just being, like, "It's poetry night."  I might need to bump sleep, grading, some plans, but I see it's been too long and just claim some time. Having a notebook handy after much driving and erring always on the side of "this is probably stupid, but..." help a lot too. For me, it's never about inspiration or intention but just dumb time management.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

When our little dude was even littler, we went full Raising Arizona. I grew and then shaved down to a Nicolas Cage mustache. With a Holly Hunter nightgown and some alternative Huggies, we could turn to the left and get our pictures taken as one.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Driving and being in unfamiliar "comfy" places (e.g. a Vrbo cabin or in someone's kitchen) can influence a tone. Subtitles on films--even silenced English-language stuff, minimally creepy eavesdropping, and, of course, music all do things.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I've been affected by the difficult men I love (Denis Johnson, Jack Spicer) and have some constants (Alice Notley, Larry Levis, Jean Valentine) but tend to spend more time with a rotation of three of four books I'll take with me as a group, reading them together until trading them in for a new mix. Right now, it's Natalie Shapero, Bernadette Mayer, John Berger, and a book of historical film criticism I'm kind of reading for a class. Lots of fiction and lots of records end up being important as they stick with me on whatever I'm doing.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Maybe act.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I hadn't ended up wherever I'm at, there were some interesting paths pointing off in other directions. I've worked as a film projectionist, a line cook, a veterinary technician, and was in some bands that were having fun, but maybe I'd work for the USPS.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I still play music and keep a pile of collage materials, but writing seemed to take over--maybe in part--because it's free and always there, my writing voice is better than my singing voice, and I, you know, like it.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just saw One Battle after Another and Train Dreams within a week of each other and like them both and, this last year, I finally read Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers and it just overwhelmed me. Like, it has a physical effect on me six months after finishing it.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I've started gathering a bunch of the stray sections and finished short pieces I've been slowly popping out over the last year or two and looking at it all together. (Post-)COVID, Trump-era cultural context is probably obvious, but it's delightfully all over the place. After hacking away the clear nopes, it's at forty-ish pages, but half of those will probably go live with a nice family upstate, on a farm, with lots of room to run around and no such thing as death.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

 

I am preparing to write a book
about the death of the mother. To write
such a book requires a mother
who does something remarkable or real
in an apprehensible way, or 

a secretive mother
whose tics and tacs construct
an almanac, aphonic archive of
the inner life, rusting
with hushed facts, or 

a mother mammoth
and serene, gliding across your path,
so the shadows of her limbs scratch
out upon your face some blood
narrative. (“[I am preparing to write a book]”)

I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch. Or, as the second poem of the prose poem quartet “AND/OR” reads:

In the photograph she perches on a large, flat rock, barely lapped by a ripple of waves visible at the right edge of the frame. She appears to be leaning back on the rock for balance, but because she is lithe and long and the rock not very large, a small, bent awkwardness interrupts her pose, so that she appears not as if balancing gracefully on outstretched arms but rather as if pressing down uncomfortably, a palpable sense of cramping discomfort intriduing into the stillness of the seaside photograph of an object on the verge of collapse.

• • •

Trace Peterson, The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep

 

I’ve been freed from
inside the Fall of Rome,
my contract disrupted.
Civilization will
not descend without
my bet against it rising,
a weather balloon
that hangs against a vast
usurped sky. A carrier
pigeon, to be,
carries me. (“AFTER BEFORE AND AFTER”)

The second full-length collection of poems by Connecticut-born poet, editor and literary scholar Trace Peterson, following Since I Moved In (Tucson AZ: Chax Press, 2007; 2019), is The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (Broomall PA: Saturnalia Books, 2025), winner of the Alma Book Award from Saturnalia Books. Set with two opening poems, the book opens into five sections of lyrics—“THE VAST CROWD,” “VIOLET SPEECH,” “VENUS,” “EXPERIMENTAL LIFE” and “THE BLUR”—all of which expands into a sharp and fluid collection of lyrics on being and becoming, and being within that pure moment of becoming and having always been. As the poem “THE OTHER MEMBERS WITH MY I.D.” includes: “Let me critique what / I’m saying about the other / members with my I.D. / Apparently the first time / I desired anything I / stayed up all night / thinking about its name / in coalescing form.”

The title poem, second of the two opening poems, runs through a sectioned list of naming a sequence of testosterone blockers: “I have not been having an easy HRT experience for a trans gal,” the poem begins, “especially when it comes to blocking testosterone so my body can develop properly to estrogen.” Each section of the poem begins with description and subsequent reaction, into what drug she switched to, with the next opening starting over, offering that new medication’s description, and so on, building into longer, more complex reactions, some of which expand into the abstract. “Walzanone helped ease off my body hair,” Peterson writes, mid-way through the piece, “but it gave me unanticipated telekinetic powers which would cause a table to fly crashing across the room when I got upset with someone, so I switched to Benefiontin.” The subsequent section reads:

Benefiontin seemed to be working for a while and I could genuinely concentrate, until I slowly became aware that it was making my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces. Punk rock anamorphosis had ended long ago, so I switched to Penalzombion.

In stunning lyric, and through surreal and dream-like stretches that veer commentary from the sublime to the ridiculous, Peterson clarifies the physical and physiological shifts of her transgender self, moving further into becoming that person that she already was, pointedly remarking on the experience itself as being surreal. In a beautifully crafted book-length suite, The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep writes gestural sweeps and concise prose lyrics around identity and public response, community and the self. Another list-accumulation poem, the seven page “EVERYONE IS A LITTLE TRANS,” includes:

Everyone is a little stitch in time
Everyone is a little grammatical error that changed the meaning of our relationship
    completely by accidentally introducing a surprise microaggression
Everyone is a little discriminated against
Everyone is a little interested in sitting on the dryer while it vibrates 

Everyone tells us everyone is a little gay means everyone who is cis
Everyone is a little white crisply ironed shirt
Everyone is a poet
Everyone says no more than what they meant

While a number of the prose poems really do strike, I particularly like the call-and-response piece “IDENTIFICATION,” offering a back-and-forth of the same repeated question—“Can I see your ID?”—through an array of responses, that include “Here it is. I changed my sex so I don’t look like this anymore, but you get the idea.” and “Do I really need an ID to return something that I already have a receipt for?” to “So here’s the deal, you correctly called me ma’am a second ago but no I am going to have to ask you to go against all available legal evidence and ask you to continue calling me ma’am after you have seen it.” to “No.” Again, Peterson showcases the brutal realities she and many others are forced to endure through such a process.

There is a music and an enduring empathy to the long threads of Peterson’s sentences, ebbs and flows of narrative of payoff and reward to move through to the very end in ways playful, layered and highly controlled. “This is a working sentence.” begins the poem “NO ONE COULD SEE THE VAST CROWD,” “Someone walks by. / Three sentences standing around bonding. / Terrible, terrible sentences. / The third sentence resents the fourth sentence more than the fifth. / Sitting in a late cafe crying. / Trying to stare down carbs with the mistress’s tools.”