“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

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.” Stacey’s new book is part of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series of the University of New Mexico Press.