Your Mother’s Bear Gun is available from River River Books, or through Bookshop, Amazon, or, best of all, your local bookstore. Use the contact form to query about a signed or personalized copy.
About the book: 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.
Your Mother’s Bear Gun was a finalist in the 36th Annual Reading the West Book Awards, and is currently a finalist in the 2026 High Plains International Book Awards for Poetry.
Advance Praise
“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 The Cloud Path and Pictograph
“‘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 21 st 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
“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, Montana Poet Laureate, author of Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, and One Sentence Journal.
Other Praise
“There are so very many ways I could recommend this book—for its virtuosic control of complicated syntax, its prayerful attention to the natural world, its respectful and incisive interrogative bent, the striking intimacy of its frequent direct address, its deft run order—but I’d recommend even a less finely crafted version if it left me thinking, as this one did long after I put it down, about the worldmaking connections between stewardship and control, between women in danger and endangered species.”
— Melissa Crowe, The Bear Reviews
“These are poems of danger, preservation, each carefully examining the limits and possibilities of the natural, social, and interior worlds in which we live…Your Mother’s Bear Gun is a journey of landscape and memory, of finding the glitter among the broken landscapes of our lives. It is a guide on creating beauty and safety despite a world that could and often does harm…”
— Amanda Auchter, Rhino Reviews
“Williamson observes her world with humility and seriousness, and she makes nature a springboard for sharing a diversity of wisdom…Williamson’s writing has uncommon integrity in the way it comprehends both nature’s loveliness and its perils. In her writing, beauty doesn’t mitigate danger, though danger can put beauty into sharper relief.”
— Emily Updegraff, Cider Press Review
