Jump the Gun

Auteur

Jennie Malboeuf is the author of jump the gun, forthcoming from (BOA Editions, 2025), and God had a body, awarded the 2019 Blue Light Books Prize by Adrian Matejka (Indiana UP and the Indiana Review, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, The Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Harvard Review. Born and raised in Kentucky, she received a BA at Centre College and an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the recipient of a 2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, son, and dog.

Texte du rabat

jump the gun digs deep into the dark undercurrents of grief and gun violence that shadow our daily lives in America. These poems uproot the hidden
recesses of life, the stages and struggles of womanhood, and our continual fight against violence, both internal and external, in the U.S. today. 

The speaker in these
poems wrestles with the everyday fears and realities we often try to ignore:
the complex expectations
placed on young girls and mothers alike, the illusion of childhood innocence,
and the very real
consequences of our environmental destruction.

Split into two
sections—with poems that layer blood-soaked images between close-ups of the
body and domestic life—this collection deftly illustrates the beauty that can be
found in tragedy, the
fragility of the natural world, and the resilience of the human relationships
that fill it.

To read jump the gun
is to witness yourself through the crosshairs. In Malboeuf’s words, “What hit you has become you. /
Pieces of the bullet embedded / in your skin. Even / that which you come from / will never be the
same. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons.”

Contenu

I.

Sex and Violence

Climate

Environment

Etymology of Gun

The Brass Bell

My Father Tells the Story of Seeing Tanya Tucker

Dancing on a Bar

How to Drive in Snow

The Mirror of God Is Only Glass

Litany

Marigolds

Piety

New Town

The Part of My Father Will Be Played by Jack Nicholson

Every Time You Type Moth, You Type Mother

The Book of Eyes

In Vivo Paradox

Girl on Girl

Aging

Luster

Lakes of the Other Carolina

Year of the Bonfires

The Human Animal

animals making music

The Questionmark Butterfly

Invasion

Prophesy

II.

Hiatus

thaw

The Mass Shooter of the Day Lived on My Childhood Street

(another) Reinvention of the Beginning of the Universe

Prosperity

Algorithm

Land and Sky

As Soon as We Are Born We Start to Die

Appellation Before Christening

5

Stork

making a man

blonde boy

epiphany

Trigger Warning

Pentecost

Pastoral of the Upland South

Culling

Jeremiad

The Two Near-Deaths of My Father

Like the Resurrection of Roseanne

Vanitas

The Position of the Sun in the Sky

Far Cry

Attrition

The Year We Met

No ideas but in objects

The Future

The Birth of the Moon

Acknowledgments