"Sara Moore Wagner's Swan Wife toggles between the world of fairy tales and the world we live in, both of which are gruesome and tender, beautiful and dangerous." —Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
"By delving into myths—of marriage, of motherhood, of the fairytales fed to us and which we feed in turn to our children—whether it's wife as Circe or swan or an August morning, or husband as kingfisher or a serpent in the garden, Swan Wife moves past fable into the difficult, often more surreal truths of daily domestic life. Lyric and sensual, feminist and vulnerable, Sara Moore Wagner makes the hero's journey her own, reveling in the transformations possible through deeper self-knowledge and the ensuing ability to express your desires." —Jessica Jacobs
Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize-winning full-length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (forthcoming in 2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022), and the author of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. In 2023, she became the Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press. She teaches Creative Writing part time at Northern Kentucky University, where she recently received their Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity award.
She lives in West Chester, OH with her filmmaker husband Jon D. Wagner and their children, Daisy, Vivienne, and Cohen.
"A book of poetry that simultaneously frightens and beguiles is a rare treasure; and Swan Wife, by Sara Moore Wagner, does precisely that. These original poems are often startling in their fearlessness and beauty. Each piece resonates with the astounding strangeness of everyday life and creates shifting worlds that are both fairytale and madness. The sheer weirdness of metaphor drew me in immediately, and Wagner reveals herself as an expert craftsman of the surreal image, the internal metaphor, and the spellbinding complexities of impulse, intimacy, and desire. Sara Moore Wagner seems to have a secret window into perception and experience, and in Swan Wife, she unravels what she sees. The poems are organic, physical, archetypal, and supernatural. The voice is startlingly honest and precise. Swan Wife examines wildness caught; but only for an instant—as a sparrow, a tensile wing, or an unsettling dream. Wagner pulls apart how we are trapped by domesticity, intimacy, gender roles, relationships, and our bodies. The poems in this book will surprise you. In craft and in voice, they are original, relentless, and vulnerable. Sara Moore Wagner is a poet who sees the world through her own strange prism, and in Swan Wife, the reader is offered a glimpse into worlds both alluring and frightening—yet tempered with Wagner's hyper-perception, sensitivity, and deep instinct. " - Mary Robles
"Sara Moore Wagner's Swan Wife toggles between the world of fairy tales and the world we live in, both of which are gruesome and tender, beautiful and dangerous. Wagner masterfully employs classic tropes from the Brothers Grimm, Joseph Campbell, and the Bible to explore what is to be a woman here and now, and to shapeshift into a wife and mother, her skin a 'fine new hide/ to carry home to the children, to place by the fire.' It's no wonder that a book so much about transformation would be transformative." - Maggie Smith
"Framed by the story of the swan wife, who is transformed from wild animal to wife through marriage, Sara Wagner's luminous new collection reimagines the domestic. In poems that range from darkly funny personae like 'Housewife as Rumpelstiltskin' to the tender intimacy of the postpartum, this book rejects the subsuming of identity that so often accompanies marriage and motherhood. Wagner's capacious imagination ranges from fairy tales, Anne Sexton, and the pressure to create a 'pinterest wedding,' to historical figures including Anastasia Romanov and Anne Askew, and more. Together, these poems remake a vision of the domestic life that's imbued with wildness and joy. " - Nancy Reddy
"By delving into myths—of marriage, of motherhood, of the fairytales fed to us and which we feed in turn to our children—whether it's wife as Circe or swan or an August morning, or husband as kingfisher or a serpent in the garden, Swan Wife moves past fable into the difficult, often more surreal truths of daily domestic life. Lyric and sensual, feminist and vulnerable, Sara Moore Wagner makes the hero's journey her own, reveling in the transformations possible through deeper self-knowledge and the ensuing ability to express your desires: 'I'll want him to say / my name forever, as it was before him…. // un-fathered, / my only name.'" - Jeslitersica Jacobs
