Bad Faith, Obsession and Guns: on Reading Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner
In early 2024, I bought a copy of poet Sara Moore Wagner’s newest book Lady Wing Shot — a collection of poems about the life of America’s fabled female sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the poet’s reckoning with her own family history of gun violence, and the complicated patriarchal myth-making of our gun-obsessed culture. And then I hid it from myself for six months.
I have a problem with guns. And Lady Wing Shot isn’t just a book about guns; it’s a book with guns on the cover — a pair of delicate mid-19th century pistols chiseled with grape vines tendril-ing down the barrel. Guns reminiscent of a garden. A lady’s guns. Certainly not suggestive of the 21st century’s beastly AR-15 semi-automatic rifles that slaughter our friends at the movies and grocery stores and our children as they huddle in their classrooms.
The guns on the cover of Lady Wing Shot were made for display and are currently owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were never used to kill anyone.And, there is no record that Annie Oakley ever killed a person, though she un-alived her share of birds and animals. As historical figures go, if Wagner had to focus her poems on someone deeply entrenched in the mythic birth story of America, a country “born of bullets,” Annie Oakley — who performed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West traveling show — is a relatively safe choice. She’s a far less controversial figure than many other Americans whose legacies are equally synonymous with guns. The fact that she didn’t commit violent crimes with her gun contributes a great deal toward putting readers like me at ease.
But my problem with guns is not just about violent crime. It’s not just ethical or political. It’s — I hesitate to put it this way, but here goes — mental. My childhood-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) latched onto the theme of gun violence in the 1980s. I was living just outside of Washington, D.C. at a time when our nation’s capital was known as the “murder capital.” On the morning and nightly news, we were shown the blood-spilled streets, the ravages of gun violence. “Drive-by shooting” was a common phrase, and my OCD played it in my head like a skipping record. Every time a car passed, I thought I, too, would be shot, even in my predominantly white, middle-class suburban neighborhood. OCD doesn’t heed statistics and risk factors.
Over the decades, as gun violence became even more pervasive and American culture even more gun-obsessed, my disorder applied even more restrictive rules to fool me into feeling safe in a country that was anything but. I had to count. I had to ruminate on violent visions. I had to compulsively blink while looking at certain things in a certain pattern. It was bad to look at guns. It was bad to blink while looking at a gun, even a picture of a gun, even a gun on tv. When it comes to guns, I’ve spent my life in a cycle of obsession, compulsion, and avoidance.
Forty years later at the AWP bookfair, I held in my hands a book with a pair of pistols on its cover just long enough to pay for it. And then I slipped it in my tote between two other books with “safer” cover designs. At home, I transferred the book to my shelf sandwiched between those other books that were safe to look at, safe to blink while looking at. And there Lady Wing Shot sat for months in my otherwise dwindling to-be-read stack, hiding its silvery, triggering face.
Listen, OCD is serious and real — but also, I felt ridiculous. And you’re probably wondering why I bought this book to begin with if it was just going to haunt my bookshelf.
I’ve spent my writing career studying project books — writing them, reading them, talking to the poets who write them — of which Lady Wing Shot is a perfect example. And I’ve written my own poetry based on research similar to the on-the-ground, museum-visiting footwork Wagner conducted in preparation for writing about Annie Oakley. In that sense, I already had a kinship with this book and its author. Pics of the book were popping up on social media, and so were pics of its author — a seemingly liberal-leaning white mother of three. She seemed not unlike me.
Spoiler alert: I did unearth and look at and hold and open and finally read the book. And when I did, it was because curiosity got the best of me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read this book for the words I would find on its pages or if I wanted to try to get to the bottom of something more personal about its author, this person who, on the one hand, approached the craft of book-making in such a similar way as I, but, on the other hand, appeared to be obsessed with looking at and thinking about guns in a way that I was obsessed with not looking at or thinking about guns.
Lady Wing Shot is a book of transformation. In the very first poem, “Annie Oakley’s mother / fitted her into a bullet casing, fired her/ into the trees” in Ohio where she played as a girl. The bullet is an integral part of Annie Oakley’s mythical birth story as much as the gun is integral to the historical birth of this country. Wagner points out that “America’s Pitocin was always a gun.”
[left — Sarah Moore Wagner] Wagner is an apt user and master of metaphor, which does the poetic grunt work of transformation by turning things into other things. Metaphor is central to the act of myth-making, the transformation of a real-life figure into a larger-than-life rendition of Annie Oakley as “American Hercules.” An interrogation of how this transformation happens is the very engine at work in Lady Wing Shot.
“The American myth,” says Wagner, is “figurines sold in truck stops” like idols, not unlike how those pistols on the cover of the book are housed in a museum of art, how Wagner herself sets foot with her children in the National Annie Oakley Center at Garst Museum, how this book itself becomes an artifact — a documentary poetics of sorts — of transformative myth-making.
If this book takes its place on a spectrum of researched documentary poetics, it leans toward the side of lyric. Wagner takes, as is her due, poetic license with the events of Annie Oakley’s life, and that’s primarily where the enchanting magic happens. Join me a third of the way through the book, where we watch Annie Oakley “take it all off” to soak off a long day of shooting in a late 1800s bathtub:
I take out my eyes, too,
one by one, into the tub of suds and we bob
and lather until I am my eyes and my eyes are
the body, cleansed together like this.
… be nothing
but these eyes.
Clarity of vision is one of Oakley’s gifts as a sharpshooter, just as it is one of Wagner’s gifts as a poet. Wagner invokes magical surrealism as well as transformative, shape-shifting metaphor to create this scene in the bathtub which, despite its absurdity, clearly appears to be happening. Whereas I, as reader, can make no such claims to clear-sightedness — in fact, my sight is so clouded by OCD, so heavy is my bias against guns, that no amount of lathering my eyeballs in the tub will clean the intrusive visions of gun violence from my mind — something transformative happens to me as I read these pages, awash in Wagner’s vivid playfulness. Although we walk toward challenging territory, I feel led by an expert tour guide. The poet’s artistry is how she earns my trust. Such that whatever suspension of disbelief this poet asks of me, I will give it. I eagerly participate in this strange and beautiful world.
But as much as I’m enchanted by craft, I cannot be wholly won by it. Poetic language is merely the adornment on the barrel of the gun; the poem’s subject is the bullet. On the one hand, thematically cohesive project books are great for marketing. With a readily identifiable aboutness, they arrive pre-packaged in their own self-made elevator-pitch wrapping. On the other hand, they might also be reduced to that elevator pitch to the detriment of all other things — the singular selling point that attracts or detracts readers. Either you’re going to want to read a book about guns or you’re not.
The memoirist Melissa Febos has famously advised authors to “write for the reader of best faith, the reader who most needs your work.” “Do not,” she cautions, “write for the bad faith reader.” Advice to live by when you’re giving your vulnerable words to the blank page. But this advice has also persuaded me to question how I receive those words a reader.
Was I a bad faith reader? Perhaps what I’d initially perceived as curiosity was in fact veiled expectation. I realized I was engaging with Lady Wing Shot in such a way that I expected the author to earn my good faith. I was reading with purpose toward unearthing — beneath the luster of poetic language — a redeeming foundational argument for platforming a figure like Oakley.
I had started reading around Lady Wing Shot by reading other books about guns I’d more readily accepted as a reader of best faith. And I thought about why those books had felt easier to access. I returned to reread Alexandra Teague’s poetry collection The Wise and Foolish Builders, which I’d easily devoured because: project book (check!), based on research (check!). At the collection’s heart is Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester repeating rifle fortune. On its cover is a dizzying collage of the never-finished Winchester Mystery House, which existed in a continual state of renovation undertaken by the heiress to, legend has it, appease the ghosts of those killed by Winchester guns. On some level, Winchester’s obsessions make sense to me. Alexandra Teague, described by the speaker in her poem “Range” as “I, atheist, pacifist,” is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells, an anthology with a mission to “call for the end of gun violence with the activist power of poetry.”
I read Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum. Yes, there’s a gun on the cover, but it’s an artist’s representation — fat, cartoonish, rust orange. I already knew this was a project book based on research, and I knew the author, an “unarmed dad,” is anti-gun. The author set out across America to interview and understand gun owners, and though, like Alexandra Teague’s The Wise and Foolish Builders, Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum presents a nuanced interrogation of gun ownership and gun violence, the collection is both thoroughly smart and enjoyable (if that’s the right word?) if you’re like me and looking for something with, ultimately, anti-gun confirmation bias.
I read Jennifer A. Sutherland’s Bullet Points. A harrowing, lyrical essay/long poem that stutters and reaches outward in multi-tentacled ways as it struggles to say the horrific thing out loud — that the author was witness to gun violence at a public courthouse.
I’ve done a lot of work to open up my own vulnerability in speaking directly about OCD. I published a memoir in prose poems about OCD, and I wrote and published an essay interrogating the intersection of America’s gun violence problem and my history with OCD. These things were hard to do, but they have transformed me, and I’m stronger now. I could handle, I told myself, this collection of poems about Annie Oakley. I could handle, I told myself, physically handle a book with a picture of a gun on the cover.
But I couldn’t shake the initial question: why Annie Oakley? Wasn’t she, after all, a responsible (if not a guilty) participant in the gun-toting sensationalism on which this country was forged? In her poem titled “At the Annie Oakley Festival, There Are So Many Trump 2024 Banners,” Wagner describes “a man with power / so thick it could blow you apart.” The speaker argues, “I am not saying guns don’t kill people. / I am saying men kill people,” but was not Annie Oakley, despite having never killed a person herself, at least formative in making those men? And doesn’t this book, at least in some respects, assert that Annie Oakley (and by extension, her gun) was cool? Fearless, talented, gender-defying. In the poem, “How I Am Annie Oakley,” the speaker professes her desire to feel not just as powerful, but even more powerful — not merely revered by the public but feared: “I want to be …
a kind of woman the world will say I can’t be:
No. I want to be a woman with a gun slung
on her shoulder. I don’t want to be watched,
a figure poised and doing it for fun.
I want the world to run.
Surely, in the end, this book must have an anti-gun message. Right? (And what if it didn’t?)
Perhaps it would be an embarrassing admission of my own closed-mindedness to say that Wagner earned my good faith by showing that her beliefs align, at least partly, with my own. Or by offering evidence that she had suffered a legacy of gun violence in her own family that might explain (in an overreaching, armchair-psychology sort of way) the poet’s obsession with this subject. But I admit this did happen.
It doesn’t take long to realize Lady Wing Shot is about more than Annie Oakley. The first two Oakley poems are followed by a poem about the speaker’s innocent childhood game to “be the best cowboy/on the block,” in which the toy cap pistol “in my little hands/ is never affront. / I’m coy as a clay pigeon” (a hint of the complexity of gendered norms to be interrogated later). And fourth, there’s a poem about the speaker’s own mother called “Ohio’s Other Annie Oakley,” in which we learn that the poet’s mother was, like Oakley, “famous in her own small town/ for her exacting aim,” having practiced “shooting/ in the basement of the bowling alley” in the 1970s with a tradition of guns and ammo passed down from the speaker’s great grandfather. Nestled in the first stanza of this poem is a critical moment: the poet puts back into the story something her mother leaves out:
My mother leaves her mother out,
leaves out her mother’s body she found when she was
just fourteen, bullet ridden on the bed.
I’m purposely conflating speaker and poet because Sara Moore Wagner has told us as much outright in an interview published at the back of her (likewise astounding, complex, and beautiful) previous collection, Hillbilly Madonna. She says, “My mother was a champion sharpshooter, and her childhood was disrupted by the shooting of her mother and grandmother by her grandfather.” In this interview, Wagner talks about choosing what to tell and what to withhold. “You have to hide and reveal certain things for impact,” she says. The impact of this moment, in which Wagner the poet — Wagner the heiress of generational trauma — chooses to tell this part of the story, can’t be understated. What does Wagner do with her inheritance? She reclaims her power by speaking her truth.
[left — Annie Oakley] Lady Wing Shot is also about women’s empowerment, and it’s an investigation of the complex patriarchal history of guns and gun violence in this country. Female sharpshooters were few and far between, but Annie Oakley herself argued that she needn’t have been so unique. “Any girl / can learn to shoot like I do,” she insisted, and in fact, she wanted her legacy to be teaching girls to shoot: “Imagine a school where every girl has a book/ and a gun.”
But Lady Wing Shot shows us women can find empowerment by either taking or refusing the gun. Oakley exceeded the limitations of her gendered upbringing by picking up a gun (“She knew how to shoot/ her way out of that house where girls/ would pick vegetables”). But what does “Ohio’s Other Annie Oakley” do? Wagner’s mother breaks the generational cycle of trauma in her family by putting her gun down to “get us out, above the history/ of fingers on triggers.” Wagner’s mother “never puts a gun in [her daughter’s] hands.”
As someone who experiences obsession manifesting in both poetic craft and medically diagnosed disordered thinking (OCD), I’m obsessed with obsession. What is it inside of us that makes it tick? And what is it about a certain subject matter that calls us to return and return, finding it endlessly fascinating?
Writers return to the site of complexity. If the answer was easy to find, we wouldn’t need to ask the question again and again. The subject matter wouldn’t sustain a writer’s interest, and a collection of poems wouldn’t sustain a reader’s interest.
Lady Wing Shot undeniably sustained my interest. As a reader, I’m riveted. I am, if you will, obsessed with this book. I read it and re-read it. I can’t stop thinking about it. Here I am writing about it. The obsession itself is the engine that turns the page.
As a writer, I see Wagner returning to the history of guns in this country to ask the question, how did this happen? And she is curious about her own family history. A poem in Hillbilly Madonna called “What My Mother Saw” imagines the moment “my mother watched her mother get shot / in the head.” The poet’s obsession with sight, which recurs throughout Lady Wing Shot (recall the eyes in the bathtub), is an obsessive curiosity about witness and history, especially that which cannot be seen by the poet herself. In another poem in Hillbilly Madonna, the speaker says, “even though I never saw her do it, I can imagine” [my] mother “putting her eye to the sight” of her gun and “honing/ on the way a bullet explodes on impact.” And in Lady Wing Shot, the poem “My Mother’s Eye” attempts to catalogue the things her mother must have seen on that violent day “the gunshots / burrow[ed] in the walls” of her home.
Toward the end of the collection, Wagner speaks with self-awareness about her obsession with Annie Oakley, saying, “I have taken a bullet from her grave, intend to wear it, even though she never shot it. I want to understand her name, her place of rest, and this ache in my pelvis.” The location of this ache in the woman’s body, the origin of life, recalls Wagner’s curiosity about her own family history (“the womb of chaos my mother burst from”) as much as her curiosity about the birth story of American gun culture at large and how we can move beyond where we came from: “I want to know,” she says, “the right/ words to heal this country.” The first step forward is looking back, with clarity of vision, at where we came from. Wagner fiercely takes a giant leap forward with her relentless, sharply critical eye in Lady Wing Shot.
In terms of OCD, just accessing this book required the work of exposure. I started with my own curiosity: could I look at the book? Could I leave the book lying around in my study uncovered? Could I touch the book? Could I hold it? Could I crack it open and start reading? All these things having nothing to do with the author or the quality of the poetry inside.
Whereas I’ve spent my life, for my own reasons, avoiding guns, Wagner faces them straight on. As it turns out, both of us had something to learn from Annie Oakley: “She knew to not look at the gun, but at the thing,/ to point at what you wanted until it fell / at your feet.”
The three of us — I as reader, Sara Moore Wagner as poet, and Annie Oakley — in very different ways are looking beyond the gun toward the thing we want: a less violent future, a new legacy, a rebuilding of the American myth.
It took six months, but thankfully, I looked beyond the gun to discover one of my new favorite poets writing today. I’m better for having been exposed to Lady Wing Shot. I’m transformed.