Shake it up & throw it at something hard

B.T. Shaw

Shake it up & throw it at something hard began in a dream (speaking of babies, we said bombs) and grew into an exploration of the sentence as both delivery system and blast wave.

Many of these pieces were built while I lived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. China had constructed an oil rig in waters so disputed they have no agreed-upon name, and anti-Chinese protests swelled not far from my family’s home. Factories burned. Rhetoric swirled like smoke, like fear. Every body ticked.

“Do planes slow down to drop babies?

Theoretically, they do not. The laws of kinematics do not require them to slow down. Instead, where and when they drop their babies have already been sort of predetermined by the laws of physics.”

B.T. Shaw grew up in Ohio. Her work includes This Dirty Little Heart (recipient of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry from Eastern Washington University Press) and the forthcoming Dear Dear, a chapbook collaboration with poet Jennifer Richter and visual artists Larissa Hammond and Abra Ancliffe. Shaw’s writing has received support from Oregon Literary Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts and has appeared recently in journals such as Seneca Review, The Found Poetry Review, and Hubbub, as well as in the exhibit Echoing Nostalgia at San Art Gallery, Ho Chin Minh City. She lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.