New Poems in Wrath-Bearing Tree!
I’m coming to the end of working on Civilians, the final poetry collection in my military-spouse trilogy, which started with Stateside and continued with Dots & Dashes. Civilians considers what happens to a military marriage once the active-duty service member retires, as my own husband did several years ago. What happens once the uniform is removed for good? Once the language of service no longer suffuses daily life?
Four of the poems I wrote in the final push to finish the manuscript are now up at Wrath-Bearing Tree, a literary journal that was “established by combat veterans” and is “maintained by a diverse board of veterans, military spouses, and writers compelled by themes of social justice and human resilience.” This grouping of poems means a lot to me; they explore what it means to write about a marriage that is very much affected by American foreign policy, a marriage that is not permitted to simply exist as a marriage but must always be seen through the lens war and politics, even as the couple remain two people simply trying to find their way toward one another in this difficult, combative world.
If you’re interested, you can read the poems here.