Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• 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 it crack open in the other’s clean break.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• Waite ties together series of poems within the collection via titles and dialogues. The series of poems simply titled “Masculinity” are tender conversations between the adult speaker and their boyhood self, who was often stifled in their formative years. This becomes a book-length conversation spanning a lifetime, connecting the speaker’s two personas.
• Another series of poems is a different kind of conversation: “Men Who Think I Am One of Them Speak” are subtitled with sexist quotes from various men and the poem is the speaker’s refusal to participate in misogyny, breaking the illusion that they are one of the guys.

This book is in conversation with:

• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
• Water I Won’t Touch by Kayleb Rae Candrilli
• The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood by Krys Malcolm Belc

Questions this book made me ask:

• What aspects of womanhood and manhood have each of us learned and inherited from our parents? Which attributes do we want to reject, and which do we want to keep?
• How much of our identity is informed by how other people perceive us?
• What would you tell your childhood self about your life now?

Who I would give this book to:

• Parents who aren’t or don’t see themselves as part of a nuclear family.
• Butches whose genders are complicated, expansive, and queer.
• Readers who love memoir-esque poetry collections.