Love For the Gun by Casey Thayer
Purchase your copy of Casey Thayer's Love for the Gun here. Additional copies may be purchased at a discounted price (see add-ons). Delivery time is 5-7 days (excluding pre-orders).
Praise for Love for the Gun:
"In Love for the Gun, the TEC-9 trappings of masculinity—“big guns, small bore”—are usurped, remixed & rearranged, until the rifle becomes a blunt instrument of intimacy between hunter & frail son: “I worked / at growing softer, held the pistol / like a hurt bird, perhaps a swallow. / Not like my father, as a man might do.” These poems are double-barreled in their approach: Ecstatic & elegiac. Reverent & irreverent. They are anthems for love & loss of god & country that modulate, expertly, between intellect & levity. Stirring with vulnerability & lyric precision, Casey Thayer’s aim is true."
–Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer and Maybe the Saddest Thing
“Casey Thayer’s Love for the Gun manages the astonishing feat of re-enchanting its titular object neither as ideological abstraction nor instrument of violence, but as part of a culture passed down—almost tenderly, as Thayer describes it—from fathers to sons in the American Midwest. With ethical nuance and formal verve, Thayer shows how guns serve simultaneously as prosthesis—covering over a lack, like “testicles [on] the trailer hitch”—and paternal inheritance, that instrument through which, as in hunting culture, fathers demonstrate their love. “My father gift[ed] it to me,” Thayer writes, “all that / thunder, all that makes a man a man / to fear.” Throughout, Thayer’s language pulses with a gorgeous materiality. “The deer can’t leave the wake it’s making / by moving,” he writes in one poem, or—indication of Thayer’s tonal reach—“He twitpic his prick, / and it trended as #That’sIt?” Darkly humorous, resonant with a swagger cut by humility and self-doubt, Love for the Gun is a stunning meditation on class, masculinity, and whiteness in the contemporary United States. It is a bold, bravura reckoning with the violence that makes and unmakes us.”
–Christopher Kempf, author of What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men