jump the gun

(Paperback)

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Inher second collection, JUMP THE GUN, Jennie Malboeuf digs deep into the hiddenrecesses of a life, exploring the stages and struggles of womanhood, the waysin which memory shapes us, and the continual fight against the darkundercurrents of grief and gun violence that shadow our daily lives in America.

The speaker in thesepoems wrestles with the everyday fears and realities we often try to ignore:thecomplex expectationsplaced on young girls and mothers alike, the illusion of childhood innocence,andthe very realconsequences of our environmental destruction.

Split into twosections-domestic life thatbloom with intimacy-tragedy, thefragility of the natural world, and the resilience of the human relationshipsthat fill it.

To readJUMP THE GUNis to witness yourself through the crosshairs. In Malboeuf's words, "What hityou has become you. /Pieces of the bullet embedded / in your skin. Even / that which you come from /will never be thesame. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons."

Reviews

jump the gun is made of sharp and beautiful poems. There is a striking fullness to the lives,experiences, and landscapes within these pages, all told with arresting clarityEnough ofmirrors. They are water, Jennie Malboeuf writes. As incisive as it is lyrical, as vast as it isintimate, this book is a force. Chloe Honum, author ofThe Lantern Room

JennieMalboeufsjump the gun, is a book of temporal distortions, sudden jumps, hesitations, slowed and sped up lines, that take the reader through a complex of registers circling gun culture, violence, family, and the natural world, in often startling juxtapositions. Its a formally thrilling collection, even as the content moves from lyrically beautiful to starkly brutal. Im so tired of the pattern of snow then rain. Irony after irony, your / suffering then mine handed / back and forth, Malboeuf writes, and I feel that tension, that inevitable back and forth throughout the book, the closely observed violences enacted daily, directly presented, forcing us to look at ourselves, this world weve made. But even at its most unflinchingly conflicted, with The father in father clothes. / The mother in mother hair, its filled with empathy, as this imperative to look, to remember, to see the worlds violence and misfortune, is also to remind ourselves that its also filled with creation, continuance. Its a deeply humane book, one Ive been utterly captivated by. John Gallaher, author of Brand New Spacesuit

Author Bio

JennieMalboeuf is theauthor of jump the gun, forthcomingfrom (BOA Editions, 2025), and God had abody, awarded the 2019 Blue Light Books Prize by Adrian Matejka (Indiana UPand the Indiana Review, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, The Gettysburg Review, Virginia QuarterlyReview, The Southern Review, and HarvardReview. Born and raised in Kentucky, she received a BA at Centre Collegeand an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is therecipient of a 2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship. She lives in Kentucky with herhusband, son, and dog.