jump the gun
Product details
- ISBN 9781960145413
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 29 May 2025
- Publisher: BOA Editions, Limited
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.”
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.
