The Dug-Up Gun Museum

Matt Donovan’s third collection, The Dug-Up Gun Museum, offers a survey of American gun culture. The book opens with a farcical tour of rifle heiress Sarah Winchester’s haunted house in “Portrait of America as a Friday the 13th Flashlight Tour of the Winchester Mystery House,” a poem derived from the poet’s libretto for an opera funded by a Creative Capital grant. The Winchester name returns in the titular poem as a gun shop’s rooftop 30-foot replica of John Wayne’s preferred model, originally made for a July 4th parade. Donovan even puts a Winchester in our hands at the Cody Firearms Experience, where

you can pull the trigger
             on every American gun, pour your powder down the
                                                                                    barrel
         of a pioneer musket, or batter your shoulder
with an M-16. Their slogan: From Flintlock
             to Full Auto, an alliterative phrase that glides through
         three centuries of weapons that shaped our country—
Winchester, Gatling, Tommy Gun, breechloading trapdoor. 

Other sources for the poems include The Colt Firearms Collection, military simulations, presidential assassination, mass shootings, trauma surgeon interviews, and cases of police shootings.

Donovan also steps into the powerful field of existing poems about Tamir Rice: see Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving”; A. Van Jordan’s “Airsoft”; Geffrey Davis’s “Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy,” among others. In “The Etymology of Gazebo,” Donovan addresses the relocation of the gazebo where police shot 12-year-old Rice. The city of Cleveland wants to be rid of it, and:

People are tending to it with care,
shoveling dirt, carrying lengths

of metal & wood, scraping
shingles from the roof,

disassembling everything

down to the ribbons knotting 
the beams, down to the cement 

Reacting to a speech by Theaster Gates, the artist who helped salvage the gazebo, Donovan says: “memorial and honor so often slip / through our hands like water.” Are poems about gun violence memorials, honors, or sometimes something more problematic? Perhaps it is better to ask why we can’t not write about guns. For when the speaker in “Shooting Justin Bieber & bin Laden in the Woods” tries to control—and make sense of—the parade of gun videos automatically loading for a son, we are made culpable as we watch, too.