psychology
by BT Shaw
Since 2008, I’ve been wrangling a poetic series sparked by a Marine-on-Marine murder in Jacksonville, NC — home not only to the US Marine Corps's Camp Lejeune but also my first journalism gig. Built on news reports, personal interviews, autopsy reports, training manuals, and the like, the series attempts to catalyze difficult compassion for soldiering — its toll on individual lives and society’s culpability for the fallout. Which sounds all high-minded and determined. The reality is, one rainy winter afternoon in Portland, Oregon, struggling with writer’s block and preoccupied with recent grief, I thumbed through a USMC publication. Suddenly “The Infantry” revealed its infant. I kept looking.
After many years in Portland, Oregon, BT Shaw lives with her husband and a startling number of geckoes in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her poems recently have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as the minnesota review, Hubbub, SP CE poetry collective’s LOVEbook 2014, and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She’s completing a second collection with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Please find her at bt-shaw.com.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1