Your Mother's Bear Gun by Corrie Williamson

​
 

The list of matters that rises to its speaker’s mind when she tries to meditate provides a good sense of the wide-reaching, enmeshed joys and concerns at the heart of Your Mother’s Bear Gun, by Corrie Williamson: “frogsong, / bear emergence, death of all / salmon-kind, local proliferation of buried nuclear / silos, blossom-riot of bees in pollen tresses, a child / reaching into an unlocked gunsafe.” This tough and tender collection connects human suffering and the fate of the living earth, delivering a nuanced personal and political examination of gender and power against a backdrop of historic and ongoing abuse of the natural world. It would be at home—on a nightstand, on a syllabus—among other books that investigate how white supremacy, patriarchal violence, and a kind of cruel anti-environmentalism sustain each other and endanger us all. (Toni Jensen’s Carry comes immediately to mind, as does Erica Berry’s Wolfish.) 

I’m really into bears. I was trained as a scholar to believe in the best practice of revealing one’s biases straight away, so there it is. I write about them in my own books. The walls of my home are covered with prints and etchings of bears—a pink cheeked girl cradling a sleeping cub, grizzly on a settee holding a teacup, black bear in stoic profile above a thick wax seal, blood red. I come from their country, a Big North Woods still lush and remote enough to support wildlife such that you might be likelier on a morning walk along the overgrown roadside to encounter a bear than a car. I know several women who’ve experienced such encounters while foraging for fiddleheads or picking wild strawberries. The stories they tell about their interspecies run ins reveal a healthy fear but also admiration and a sense of their luck—to live in such a wilderness, to share it with bears. Reading Williamson is a little like listening to their thrilled and humbling tales.

I’m fairly into mothers, too, and while I’m not into guns—at all—they were everywhere, more common than bears, during my upbringing. I saw them in my home, in the arms of the men I most loved; I shot them, and aside from the inaugural aftershock of the kickback, they didn’t scare me. While I may have been tempted, before reading this book, to regard my father’s rifle as almost wholly unrelated to the military grade weapons used to murder first graders and nightclub patrons and parade goers with horrifying ease and frequency, I experienced Your Mother’s Bear Gun as unfolding along the uneasy intersection of those bygone guns—familiar tools—and the fearful and divisive omnipresence of the weapons Americans wield, increasingly, against one another. Children walk out of school in protest and the speaker’s father accidentally shoots a gun while cleaning it, putting a hole in the wall of their house. Juxtaposition as rhetoric, the tension of the quick turn—over and over, Williamson makes the most of poetry’s moves to say more than she says, to make me feel and then to think. 

There are so very many ways I could recommend this book—for its virtuosic control of complicated syntax, its prayerful attention to the natural world, its respectful and incisive interrogative bent, the striking intimacy of its frequent direct address, its deft run order—but I’d recommend even a less finely crafted version if it left me thinking, as this one did long after I put it down, about the worldmaking connections between stewardship and control, between women in danger and endangered species. Even without its wise and delicious habit of pairing two vivid nouns to evoke the strange doubleness of our interactions with the perceptible world (“bloom and dissolution,” “yowl and tremble,” “hoist and howl”), I’d urge you to read it for the way it insists upon the gravity inherent in the stories we tell about safety—who’s entitled to it, upon whom we foist it, who provides it and how, who and what we regard as acceptable collateral damage in our efforts to preserve what we prize.

Williamson doesn’t exempt herself from her ruthless examination of human interactions with nature; her speaker, a woman living by herself in a wild place, reckons with her human power and its gendered limits. She is sometimes afraid and sometimes bold, watches calmly from her porch as a bear “big as a man” breaks into her garden but also reports, “The saw in the shed, the deadfall high / in the branches, black widow in the woodpile: / all call out casualty for one alone as me.” In spite of her keen sense of the dangers all around, she has deliberately chosen, in some ways, to limit her power and, so, risk her safety—she does not, for instance, comply with her father’s advice that she keep a gun, though she was well trained as a girl to wield one “against rogue dogs that / bloodied goats, opossum and fox / that snatched chickens by the throat, / flame-capped woodpeckers wrecking / the siding, and all the fear we’d been / given.” She doesn’t choose to own a gun, in spite of its apparent utility, but neither does she count herself immune to the human tendency to both revere and destroy what’s wild. She writes, “May all beings know // peace, I say, but the mind already / is planning where to put the poison.”

Throughout this collection we observe a woman in the act of attempting to revise the narrative of “man against nature” in favor of a more complex story, one that might produce some ending other than that toward which we appear hellbent (widespread species loss, unsurvivable climate disaster). Meanwhile she seems to experience herself as a kind of ardent and anxious interloper; she’s honest about her desire to protect the creatures she encounters as well as the damage she’s likely to do even when trying to help. Williamson writes of an attempt to free a hummingbird trapped inside her house, “How will I not / rasp the lime-dark shine from its wings, like a moth, / with my hands made for grasping human things.” We are, she suggests, not well trained for the kind of care nature might welcome; wired to move from protection to possession with startling speed, we engage so often in “a less than saintly clutching.” 

I would slide this book into your TBR pile, even minus its signature lyric and leggy couplets, for the way it links so expertly the grief of human loss with species loss, never once threatening to lapse into anthropocentric crimes of weight or scale. I’d recommend it for the way it offers the story of a missing woman, Fauna Frey, against the backdrop of an abandoned mine, vibrates with the weight of environmental degradation, the painful vulnerability of women and of what’s wild: “Fauna, whose very name means / animal, I try not to picture you in this river, / through which I have spent all of summer’s glint / seaming the bright needle of my body” and “Are you, Fauna, weightier / than gold, and so precious / they’ll tear the canyon down to sluice you free?” I can’t speak for the poet’s intentions, of course—I had that training, too—but this reader understands the unspoken answer to the poet’s question is no. Precisely because Williamson doesn’t provide it, I must reckon with the fact that I know it anyway, that I understand already no one will tear the canyon down for anything but gold. 

I’d tell you to read Your Mother’s Bear Gun for its masterful restraint, even if it didn’t make me ugly cry—on page 60, to be specific, when Williamson writes of “love’s logic” that it bids us, “if you cannot save nor cultivate / a thing, then give it back—give it back, / to the spin, the hunger, that good unending gyre.” (Sobbing is kind of my version of Dickinson’s “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”) Read it, y’all, for its muscularity of voice and vision, for the loving precision with which it names plants and critters and human impulses and the crises that connect us all. Or read it, as I did, for the bears.

Melissa Crowe / September 3rd, 2025