Queering Parenthood with Stacey Waite: A Book Review

A Real Man Would Have a Gun interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood through lyric poetry focusing on the speaker’s childhood growing up butch and intersex and their own journey of parenthood as both a mother/father figure. Waite puts a spotlight on current anti-trans laws and responds to them directly.

Most importantly, identity in this book feels fluid and simultaneous-the speaker refuses to be pinned down and celebrates their unique path through life.

Poems that moved me:

• “The Tie that Binds”
• “Boyfriend, 1992”
• “Bathroom Poem”
• “When Butches Shoot Pool”

Lines that lingered:

• “I feel the sting of who we might become, Joel / and I, two men in the woods, one of us / a warning, the other a woman, a fleeing fire.”
• “You sing to him, / the same song your mother sung to you. / You wonder what song a real man would sing / or if the kind of man / who guards the door / would sing at all.”
• “Sometimes one of them imagines their rage contained by the triangle, / watches…