I’m also interested in gun culture – the west, how the gun is tied to the west and America’s ideas of gender and freedom. But, just for the record, I am for gun control. I’m not a member of the NRA. I do think some guns are interesting as objects – like a Navy Colt, it’s a beautiful object, it’s a weird object. Guns (in writing and otherwise) are a symbol of power and I’m interested in inverting them, examining them, putting them in the hands of women, but I also want people to examine their relationship to guns, to violence, to history, to people of another gender. It’s also subconscious. Everyone, I feel, has their own storehouse of imagery. The gun stuff comes from my own past; my father collects antique guns, but meanwhile he can’t hit the broadside of a barn. My mother, however, she’s a skeet shooter, a really good one. And my sister was in the (first) Gulf War; she is an amazing rifle -woman. My images of guns, definitely, are strongly connected to women.
more here
Q&A with Sarah Messer talking about her poem Animal Groom at fishhouse poems
mirabile dictu 