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A Real Man Would Have a Gun: Poems
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 What kind of world do we make with gender?
ACCLAIM
“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 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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of Teaching Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing as well as several previous collections of poems, including Butch Geography and the lake has no saint.
ACCLAIM
“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 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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of Teaching Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing as well as several previous collections of poems, including Butch Geography and the lake has no saint.
88 pages, Paperback
Published February 18, 2025
About the author
Stacey Waite
19 books20 followersStacey Waite was the winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize for Poetry for her first chapbook entitled Choke, as well as the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest for her chapbook Love Poem to Androgyny. She lives with her partner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she studies Tai Chi, searches for old clay roof tiles and walks through Frick Park with her greyhound, Rohen. She has been teaching writing and gender studies courses at the University of Pittsburgh for the past four years, including such courses as Queer Theory, Writing and Consciousness, Fieldwork with the Body, and Sexuality and Representation. Her poems have appeared most recently in Poet Lore, Nimrod, 5AM, West Branch, Chiron Review, and Pearl. She enjoys tending to the ficus tree, ridding the yard of dead pine needles, and sweeping the front porch.
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