When Michael Delisle was a boy, his "uncles" – in other words, his father's friends – never said "gun" but rather "piece" or "rod" or more metonymically, "heater." As in, "I have my piece in the glove compartment" and "He got rid of the heater" and "Don't forget your rod." In Le Feu de mon Pére, the poet remembers his father, a crook turned Charismatic Christian, the violent man who now spoke only of Jesus, the hated man whom you had no choice but to love, in spite of it all. 
Chantal Guy wrote in La Presse: “Michael Delisle…has never revealed quite so much of himself as in what he considers to be his most hybrid book, Le Feu de mon Pére. [It is] both an uncompromising portrait of his ‘psychopath’ father and an homage to poetry, here transformed into a weapon more powerful than a gun for putting a final bullet – into the past. The shot fired is a powerful one.”