Stacey Waite’s newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?
A Real Man Would Have a Gun believes in poetry’s ability to salve and save. In it, Stacey Waite walks a tight rope of language in these well-wrought poems that celebrate and question gender as much as they serve to cherish family. And these poems know no bounds. They chat and scream and whisper—and they even dance if you count the Cupid Shuffle. This is a brilliant beauty of a book.’—Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Tradition
This book isn’t only bold, it’s tender and broken and more complex than the tired trope of ‘queer triumph.’ This book is about family and memory and fuckups through the eyes of a poet who understands that sometimes you can’t extinguish rage; it just ‘turn(s) into / a fire of a different kind.’ We all can see ourselves in this book’s magnificent glow.’—Aaron Smith, author of Stop Lying: Poems
I will never get over the poems of Stacey Waite—and I don’t want to. A Real Man Would Have a Gun is both slow burn and bright flame, lyric compression and narrative expansion, a book that breaks childhood and parenthood, gender and sexuality—embodiment itself—freshly and sharply open.’—Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing as well as several previous collections of poems, including Butch Geography and the lake has no saint.
Part One
Honest Poem
Mothers and Men
Scar
1986
Masculinity I
The Four Nights She’s Gone
Queer Body in Summer, 1989
Karen Berry
The Tie That Binds
Masculinity II
Being Queer in High School
Boyfriend, 1992
Masculinity III
Everything is Everything
Notes on Matt Damon
Part Two
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: We know that guy, and he is not a rapist.
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: She really let herself go.
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: Check out that ass.
Masculinity IV
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: You’re not going to write poems about your kids now, right?
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: Yeah but, you know, why is she bringing this up now?
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: I forget you’re a woman sometimes.
Masculinity V
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: You know what I’m saying, right?
Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak: Dude, we are going to have to fight them off with sticks.
Masculinity VI
Part Three
Bathroom Poem
Give Us Your Pronouns
Reading Queer
Masculinity VII
Deadlocked
When Butches Shoot Pool
The Kill
Religious Liberty Accommodations Act
Masculinity VIII
Thankfully, you will have taught me freedom within constraints
Your Father
Some Notes on Family
When I Imagine the Day of Your Birth
Letter to My Grandfather
The Hit Man
A Toast to My Body at Forty-Two
The Cloud Looks Like a Breaking Wave
Masculinity IX
Acknowledgements
