Dear Dear
by Jennifer Richter and BT Shaw
Jennifer Richter’s two poetry collections, No Acute Distress and Threshold, were both published in the Crab Orchard Series and were named Oregon Book Award Finalists. She currently teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program.
BT Shaw’s recent work includes two chapbooks: The Manual of Small Wars, Volume 2 (PressBoard Press) and Shake it up & throw it at something hard (Essay Press). Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she lives and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia. These sequential epistolary poems are from our collaborative manuscript “dear :: dear,” a collection sparked by artist Abra Ancliffe’s American to Icelandic Dictionary/Íslenska til Bandariska Orðabók and drafted across cultures and continents (BT in South Vietnam, Jennifer Richter in Oregon). Like a Skype call with a bad connection, the loosely linked pieces talk over and around one another, yet always with an urgency to determine, in these politically divided times, what at our cores keeps us close.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 47.2