A Real Man Would Have a Gun

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. She is 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.

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