The poems in Your Mother's Bear Gun exist in thresholds, in liminal spaces: emotional and physical landscapes at the blurring of safety and danger, the point where preservation of self becomes harm to others. This collection explores the rugged wildernesses of Oregon, Montana, and Appalachia, inviting the reader to consider what it means to be human in a rough and hungry world. How do we protect ourselves? How do we care for each other? We pay attention, Corrie Williamson suggests. We listen. We let the wild light into our bones.

Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of two previous books of poetry: The River Where You Forgot My Name, which was a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book, and Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award.
She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, with a BA in Poetry and Anthropology, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas. She has taught writing at the University of Arkansas, Helena College, and Carroll College, and worked as an educator in Yellowstone National Park. She was the recipient of the 2020 PEN Northwest/Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven and a half months writing and living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others, as well as numerous anthologies. She lives in Montana.

" 'The world, I think, has planned for everything, save us,' Corrie Williamson writes in a vibrant and devastating language that carries the beauty and terror, the joy and sorrow of living intimately with the natural world in the 21st century. Here are poems of 'bloom and dissolution,' stories that confess a deeper need for variations on the word darkness and the ever-present culture of guns as tools and threat. Early in the collection, she declares, 'To protect // happens first and mostly in the heart, though precious / little separates it from possession.' Such tensions inform this dazzling book as Williamson's unflinching imagination and keen erudition help the reader live fully in the contradictions." — Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems

"From the first harrowing poem, 'Meditation,' in Corrie Williamson's third collection, Your Mother's Bear Gun, she is on high alert—to the threats to existence that all beings face and to our capacity for courage and joy. In these poems, Williamson navigates the complexities and contradictions in our need for protection and defense, when the tiny leaves of pennyroyal, an herbal abortifacient, are as lethal as a gun, when a woman living alone in the wilderness feels both awe and terror at the cry of a mountain lion. Through gorgeous and vigilant language, Williams reacquaints us with the preciousness and precariousness of life on earth: a hummingbird's nest 'in the apple tree's rain-chilled arms'; caddis flies, 'each a tiny heartbeat hex'; ravens riding a storm like 'black boats with slow black oars." — Melissa Kwasny, author of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

"Reading this remarkable collection I'm reminded how during hunting season of my high school days, any number of pickups in the student parking lot would contain racks supporting rifles, likely loaded, ready to perform their lethal and essential business as soon as the final bell sounded. I'm reminded of the trail I hike in the fall where the remnants of an apple orchard, gnarled and returning feral, seems to drag bear scat up from below the surface of the ground, like overnight mushrooms, and how that time a bulbous black bear—reclined against a trunk, munching away and eyeing me—seemed just shy of offering me a crunchy bite of my own as I paused before sauntering on, chest strained with joy and love. Which is to say, Corrie Williamson's gorgeous and familiar reflections are so tangled up with the landscapes of heart and wildness I'm reminded that they are really one and the same, and I emerge from the ice-sharp reverie of her work certain I won't experience so excellent a gathering of poems any time soon." — Chris La Tray, author of Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian's Journey Home