Please Use This For Children, Not For War and Guns is a masterful collection of Midwestern poetry. These are poems that viscerally and spiritually eviscerate Gustavson, with tenderness of a mother and a wife, and the anger of a partner, an advocate for children, and a citizen.

From “Please Use These Words for Children,” an activist poem about a simple letter to the government along with her family’s taxes saying, “Please use this for children, and not for war and guns…” to a poem about a conversation between a mid-western mother and her daughter about long kept secrets over an empty ice cream bucket filled with lily-of-the-valley slips, to “The Poem That Needs to Be Written” about the red-haired child growing up to be gay, this book confronts issues seldom tackled in mainstream poetry.