Sara Moore Wagner’s Lady Wing Shot is a striking poetry collection centered on the life and legacy of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, a white girl from Ohio who began shooting to feed her large, impoverished family and became famous, starring in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the late 19th century. Wagner’s poems draw details from Oakley’s history, folklore, autobiographical writings, and the muddy spaces between these categories. Many of the poems utilize epigraphs and historical details about Oakley, imagining into what is known and not known about her life. But these poems also extend beyond Oakley’s personality and biography. Lady Wing Shot meditates on Wagner’s deep-rooted connection to Oakley’s legacy and landscape. In “What Men Do,” Wagner describes this pull to Annie’s story and history: “I have taken a bullet from her grave, intended to wear it, even though she never shot it. I want to understand her name, her place of rest, and this ache in my pelvis.”

Part of this personal connection comes through Wagner’s mother. Annie Oakley believed all women should learn to shoot, and Wagner’s great-grandfather agreed. In “Ohio’s Other Annie Oakley,” Wagner describes how he trained his granddaughters (including Wagner’s mother) to shoot “in the basement of the bowling alley.” But when Wagner’s mother tells this story about shooting, it includes an important silence. “My mother leaves her mother out, / leaves out her mother’s body she found when she was / just fourteen, bullet ridden on the bed.”
Perhaps this is why
My mother, famous in her small town
for her exacting aim, never puts a gun in my hands,
tucks me in like this: the whole world is yours,
sleep, then get up. You are
what you love, she tells me.
Through these poems, Wagner articulates a lineage that connects Oakley, her mother, and herself. Like Wagner’s mother learning to shoot from her grandfather, Annie’s shooting knowledge begins when “Her father / laid a gun in her hand said shoot.”

At the end of the collection, Wagner extends this lineage to her daughter, who she is raising to love the Ohio wilderness. “I have built my child a school like summer. / May she learn as the birds do to sing in the morning and feast on fat cicadas…” This imagery echoes back to the beginning of the collection, where Annie Oakley’s early life is described through her deep relationship to her landscape. One early poem, “Little Sure Shot,” begins when Oakley “threw her birth name, Phoebe Ann Moses, / like a fat rock into the creek.” She names herself Oakley: “of the Oak, Oak Tree, like any oak tree, / like one of the 500 varieties...” Oakley is the name that reflects her strength, “dense / and resistant,” and cements her identity to the land she was raised in.

Lady Wing Shot also illustrates the pressing need to look at how our pasts and stories about our pasts shape contemporary America. Oakley’s legacy is enmeshed with romantic, violent, and White myths about the American West. In “Necessary to the Security of a Free State,” Wagner writes:
… Imagine militia
as it has always been, large groups of white men
with guns and ropes and rights. I am saying
white nationalism, imagine white nationalism
as the father of the second amendment, passing down
guns to his daughter who’d shoot clay pigeons
out of the sky.
In this poem and this collection, Wagner thoughtfully displays Oakley’s story as part of the larger story of guns, gender, and violence that builds contemporary American culture.