Your Mother’s Bear Gun, by Corrie Williamson. Published by River River Books, 2025.
Rivers, and the Poets Who Know Them
Rivers have been on my mind lately. I’ve kayaked down the Wakulla and tubed the Ichetucknee when I lived in northern Florida. These days, I take walks along the old railroad trestle that runs over the Dungeness River on the Olympic Peninsula. I am drawn to poets who know rivers. Langston Hughes: “I’ve known rivers.” Emily Dickinson: “My river runs to thee.”
Molly Spencer writes, in her most recent book, Invitatory, that the river bears her along. For several months, I tried to write a review of that lush collection. I really wanted to. I could not find the words to describe what I found there, and eventually I simply surrendered to the words on the page. I thought of it again when I read Corrie Williamson’s recent collection, Your Mother’s Bear Gun. And thoughts of rivers were sparked again by the name of the press itself: River River Books.
The Wilderness She Walks Into
Rivers run through the wild settings of Williamson’s book, alongside wolves, coyotes, ravens, bobcats, larkspur, and pennyroyal. In her poem “Mercy Me,” she embarks on a solo trip into the wilderness. Her father asks her to carry a pistol. She does not, and admits that carrying that cold weight on her hip was never how she imagined a saunter to the river looking.
Williamson and Spencer are two of my favorite poets, linked by their skill at the language of noticing. Both possess a broad sense of being, attending, and recreating the world from its disparate and contradictory fragments, its stunning and ugly bits. Both are visionary poets who imagine reconciliation with the earth, knowing destruction is always possible.
In 2020, I wrote these words in a review of Spencer’s If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019): “Throughout the book, the language is stirring, concrete, and ineffable, all at once. Lulling and disturbing images percolate in all directions, tracking the book’s central themes.” In an interview with Marisa Siegel at the Chicago Review of Books, discussing Invitatory, Spencer described the book as a drawing together, an invitation to confront the world’s beauty and its horrors at once, and to find ourselves inside that confrontation. What she said.
Also in 2020, I reviewed Williamson’s The River Where You Forgot My Name (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019) with these words: “Williamson’s poetic talents are embodied in her lush and explicit language.” In that book, Williamson is a consummate storyteller. In Your Mother’s Bear Gun, the narrative is all in the noticing. It is all in the language. And, like my response to reading Invitatory, I find it difficult to define this book. Perhaps some books resist review. But how else to convince you that you must read one for yourself?
In her most recent book, the narrative is all in the noticing. It is all in the language.
Protection and Possession
In the first poem in the collection, “Meditation,” Williamson seems to be asking not only whether one can meditate, but whether one should. Her mind cruises through the closing lines of the Buddhist Metta meditation, the traditional wish that all beings be happy, healthy, safe, and at ease. While mouthing those words, her mind trails to frogsong, to a bear’s emergence, to the death of all things. Moments later, hearing mice scuttling somewhere nearby, she is already planning where to put the poison. She knows the high stakes of survival exist for every living thing.
In “You’re Hoarding Guns, I’m Growing Herbs,” she suggests there is no cruel law or unholy act that does not, somewhere in its logic, claim to be protecting something. A retort in “A Brief History of Preservation” argues that very little separates the urge to protect from the urge to possess. The poem goes on to describe the small, contradictory tasks a person does with both fear and tenderness at once: breaking the ice on a livestock trough so the animals can drink, killing a crow to hang as a warning over an orchard, all in the name of keeping something alive.
Guns make frequent appearances throughout the collection, and thematically that is no surprise. I have chosen to read these poems metaphorically, as a kind of prayer to accept the chasm between those who grew up with guns and those, like me, who did not. Perhaps this is a book meant to introduce one side of that divide to the other. Clearly, we have much to teach each other.
The Religion of Noticing
To read this book, pay attention to, or perhaps steep in is the better phrase, how Williamson practices the language of noticing. Call it the religion of noticing, if you like. Notice how she yokes disparate ideas together. Listen to how “the fat dumpster ravens croak” in one poem. Say the words aloud. In a poem describing a sister eating a pint of liver paté after the desecration of a doe, Williamson simply observes that what she ate, ate. It is a small, strange sentence that somehow carries the whole weight of the poem.
Some of my favorite lines in the collection appear in “Your Letter Spoke of Rain,” a poem that connects memory to a river. Williamson writes of sorrow leaving her the way a foolish thing leaves, the way certain stubborn seed burrs, the kind her father calls beggar’s lice back east, eventually let go of what they were clinging to, since all they were ever trying to do was multiply. I would hope even a small taste of Williamson’s language would be enough to convince you to read this book. I do not have the words to tell you how large its scope is, or how wide its wisdom.
A Book That Resists Review
I titled this piece “The Language of Noticing” because that, more than narrative, more than argument, is the real engine of Your Mother’s Bear Gun. Williamson is not building toward a single revelation. She is accumulating small, exact observations, the ravens, the herbs, the ice on the trough, until the accumulation itself becomes the book’s meaning. That is, I think, why a plot summary would fail this collection so badly. The wisdom here is not sequential. It is cumulative, the way attention itself is cumulative, one noticed thing laid carefully beside the next until a whole world of thresholds and reconciliations comes into view.