Selected Letters

These poems really put the bear in Bea Arthur. They shake and shiver like roses on the trellis Soloy is climbing to enter the upper floors of our hearts. They are the whole marching band, and we fall in with the poet and the people and parts of his composed world, even though the music is fluttering off our music stands in this weather we’re having. I treasure this poet’s work. –Ed Skoog

In Selected Letters, BJ Soloy addresses the oldest, strangest, rumors of ourselves, whether we be deceased celebrities or his personal friends. That we are all ‘excellent/food for many predators’ is a truth he handles with an exquisite attunement both to hilarity and grief–for Soloy’s slippery, canny intelligence creates switchbacks and u-turns: his poems force recognitions sure to simultaneously reassure and discomfit. When have I gotten such deep pleasure from a vision that so readily acknowledges its own bleakness? Never. I simply follow: ‘each line a last line until the next.’ –Elizabeth Robinson

Ostensibly elegies to dead celebrities, BJ Soloy’s letters tell us more about the private life of the poet than the public figures they address. Bea Arthur’s death stirs his own remorse: ‘I do miss you in a small, potent way / & regret a lot of things.’ Merle Haggard’s aged face triggers Soloy’s ‘post- / modern brand of neurosis’ ‘My face is apparently still young, if less / & less.’ Soloy situates us in his world, a poet’s world, which is both lovely and lonely. In the end, he is on intimate terms with mortality: ‘It’s not mine–none of it.’ An original voice, blessedly frayed around the edges. –David Trinidad