On Sara Moore Wagner’s Swan Wife

Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner. San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2022. 88 pages. $18.95. Paper.

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 book is built around the traditional heroic narrative structure developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Swan Wife, Notes.) The poems build themselves on metaphor borrowed from fairytale and myth to explore realms of the body and the psyche of the “housewife”, Swan Wife, or woman who is half wild creature and half tethered by pacts of domesticity. The result is a world fraught with surreality; a continuous pushing and pulling of the self and the psyche as the speaker navigates the realms of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, beauty, permeability of the self, and autonomy.

The opening poem, “Licentious,” begins “When spring comes, I go naked to the lake / near the hospital where I was born” and captures a highly physical sense of intimate and psychic tension. The speaker commands “Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint / of my skin, how it looks like a knife” and conjures the ambivalent strangeness of the possum, “long-nosed, a jawful of teeth” to create a sense of being half-hidden, “playing dead” with a “pouch full/ of babies, thick as disease.” It’s a startling, visceral vision of self-mythos and quiet power. 

In “Like I Won’t Take Something from You,” the speaker intimates the strange fluidity of familial love and romantic love, the ways her body resembles and become the landscape she inhabits, her “golden hair” “like new hay / rolled into tiny suns.” The poems delve into the intricacies of long love, troubled girldom, and childhood blurring into adulthood. The woman as swan emerges in “Ball and Chain,” where the speaker’s partner calls her “swan” when she touches a dirty lake where no one will swim; he observes “you’ll go where you want,” and the speaker allows herself the metaphysical embrace, and stops herself from running. 

In addition to themes of duplicity and dislocation, the poems also explore physical vulnerability, permeability, rot, disease, and birth. There is a fascinating compartmentalization and animism of the body as separate vectors, as in the gorgeous motherhood poems “Venus Complex,” “Nervous Condition,” “Postpartum II,” and “Reward.” These subdued yet powerful pieces exemplify the mysterious, ambivalent spirit of poems so rooted in the body. 

Swan Wife is also lyrical and musical, and in “Circe Complex” Wagner draws on her singular command of sound and diction to create an elemental incantation reminiscent in spirit and sound to Glück, Plath, and Sexton. Similarly powerful are “A Woman Like That is Not Ashamed to Die,” which envisions a terrifying landscape of motherhood and wifehood and “Getting My Body Back,” which invokes Perrault’s Donkey Skin to examine self-image, grief, and the strangeness of personal physical and mental metamorphosis:

       I try on each skin like a dress,

       each one lovelier than the next—stables

       in the heart open. They’re running.

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, Mid-American Review  

Featured Writer: Sara Moore Wagner

Thursday, March 23rd, at 7:30 PM, Sara Moore Wagner will be reading a series of her poems for the 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.  

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of multiple collections including Swan Wife, awarded with the 2021 Cider Press Review Editor’s prize, and Hillbilly Madonna, published by Driftwood Press in 2022. Wagner has also authored two chapbooks: Tumbling After released in March of 2022 and Hooked Through published by Five Oaks Press in 2017. Her work has appeared in several publications such as Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Nimrod, Western Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review. Wagner has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times as well as Best of the Net and Best New Poets awards.     

Wagner’s poems explore relationships between mother and child, father and son, and other family ties in Appalachia. Several poems address the opiate crisis that heavily ravaged Appalachia and the entire country. Poems such as “Girlhood Landscape” explore the impermanence of beauty through a young girl waning optimism, stating: “because I want to remember blooming. // Because I think I could just bloom.” These poems also depict moments of trauma associated with miscarriages. Her work incorporates fairy tales and folklore, with several poems devoted to sharpshooter Annie Oakley, myths of Tantalus and Thetis, and Biblical figures in works like “Self Portrait as Judas.” 

In her work entitled “Invasive Species,” published by the Normal School in December 2020, Wagner talks about a nest created in a dated wreath. The relationship of mother/daughter and mother bird/hatchlings seems to blur. Both mothers are “separated […] by a door” from their young. The poem closes with: 

We’re all just waiting to crack open  
or be emptied out, to be forced  
from our homes or windows,  
to destroy what we love  
because we need it,  
because we think  
we’re safe.   

There is a sense here of the complicated necessity of letting our loved ones live their own lives, continuing to love them from a distance. This necessary and natural trajectory of love and how it operates exists in these final lines. Perhaps the complexities of love lead to hurt when love is needed most. The shared habitat of the nest on the house’s door creates all these avenues of focus. 

Poem excerpts appear courtesy of Normal School and Saramoorewagner.com. Biographical info also from saramoorewagner.com. 

–Michael J Morris, MAR