Barrelhouse Reviews: Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner

Reviewed by Amber Adams

Lynx House Press / February 2024 / 106 pp

I live not far from Buffalo Bill’s grave. While I have visited the site, and even put my face in the cartoon cutout-board of Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, I never understood the appeal of these icons of the American West. Not until I read Lady Wing Shot. Wagner’s third full-length collection brings a whole new dimension to the life of Annie Oakley, one focused on her interiority rather than the legend. And what comes of this deep examination of Oakley’s life is an all-too-accurate critique of the patriarchal underpinnings of America, our cultural obsession with guns, and the way this Wild West frontier myth has given rise to a form of lawless, rugged cowboy ethos that we see cropping up in extremist groups today.

I was surprised by this collection’s contemporary urgency, a necessary message about our collective American identity and a lyrical rallying cry for feminism. The poem “How I am Annie Oakley” was particularly striking: “I needed / a man to pay half the electric bill, all the rent, / to get me a job, serving popcorn.” This follows “Annie Oakley’s Rivals,” where the speaker notes, “The secret Annie Oakley knew was this: /only the men can get you out of the world / they built.” These poems speak to each other about the way both women (Oakley and the speaker) are compelled to leverage their relationships with men to extract more freedom from a world that requires an affiliation with men for legitimacy. What I find true, and surprising, about Wagner’s collection is how she uses the autobiographical details in Oakley’s story as a leaping-off point to say something universal about the experience of being a woman in America, then and now. Historically, Oakley’s story is one of female exceptionalism—a woman who could outshoot most men. It would be easy to depict her as a figure who honed her skill to escape the domestic, puritan ideals to which women of her time (and even today) were and are subjected. Wagner never gives over to this fantasy. She constantly reminds the reader, “Like America, I am not / who you think I am.”

This is where Wagner shines: in her critique of the mythology of the imagined West—of a bootstrapped, self-reliant, gun-toting cowboy in a land “where a man could get rich / or die, could ride into sunset, return with sunrise.” The central axis of the collection, “The First Myth of the West,” is a twelve-part poem which begins with the meeting of Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley. It moves more broadly into a critique of the violence-turned-lore that added fuel to the colonizer ideology of taking whatever you want. From part nine:

If there ever was a Frontier, a sloping barren land
to take, it’s gone. Was part of that great yesterday
when a man could put his hands on any bit of land,
any tree, any woman, and lay claim, deforest,
deflower—own. Sitting Bull asked, at first,
for just the oaks to stay. He loved the shade.

What becomes evident in Wagner’s collection is the bloody costs of our heritage, and how we pay those costs throughout the ages. In “At the Annie Oakley Festival, There Are So Many Trump 2024 Banners” and “Authentic Trappings,” she describes contemporary scenes in which guns are revered and the cowboy of the dime novels is reenacted. She dares the reader: “You can wander the grounds, play / colonizer, explorer, Buffalo Bill, unite yourself / with that version of expansion…” but it is simply that: a romanticized fantasy of pillage and murder. 

Of course, Wagner’s poems also take on gun culture, and the way guns have become a ubiquitous symbol of masculine superiority in America. In the poem “Aim High” the speaker states: “On almost every corner in Ohio there is a gun store or a shooting range. / The image of masculinity in these arts is flannel clad and bearded, / hurling an axe or AR-15.” The poem cites criminal justice expert Adam Lankford, saying of mass shooters, “‘We can’t really answer that / question of differences / between male and female offenders because we don’t have enough female offenders.’”

The collection doesn’t simply use facts like this to lambast men, however. Wagner looks at gun culture with complexity, and with curiosity about the fetishization of guns. While Wagner condemns both mass shootings and the pervasiveness of guns, the speaker is also emboldened by the power they imbue. At the end of “How I Am Annie Oakley” she writes: “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.” And isn’t that longing to overcome powerlessness, to be taken seriously, and to defend oneself at the heart of the appeal of guns? For the mythological figure of Oakley, guns were a passage out of poverty and a claim to fame, and perhaps this is why her legend is still celebrated as the best of what we culturally want from guns. But the reality of firearms in contemporary America is not that myth. In the final poem, “What Annie Oakley Knew,” Wagner writes:

There can be two sunrises, one where a girl
is barefoot hunting the last rabbit to bring home
to her widowed mother, and one where the girl
is the rabbit and she is older now, working
in a gas station or grocery store and bam
open fire.

The reality is we are living in the second sunrise, where mass shootings are daily news. And reckoning our collective history with this reality is happening, “it’s coming, / no matter what you do.”

Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Longmont, Colorado. Her debut collection, Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022), was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver, and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, American Literary Review, Witness, HAD, 32 Poems, and elsewhere.