jump the gun

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.

• I.Sex and ViolenceClimateEnvironmentEtymology of GunThe Brass BellMy Father Tells the Story of Seeing Tanya TuckerDancing on a BarHow to Drive in SnowThe Mirror of God Is Only GlassLitanyMarigoldsPietyNew TownThe Part of My Father Will Be Played by Jack NicholsonEvery Time You Type Moth, You Type MotherThe Book of EyesIn Vivo ParadoxGirl on GirlAgingLusterLakes of the Other CarolinaYear of the BonfiresThe Human Animalanimals making musicThe Questionmark ButterflyInvasionProphesyII.HiatusthawThe Mass Shooter of the Day Lived on My Childhood Street(another) Reinvention of the Beginning of the UniverseProsperityAlgorithmLand and SkyAs Soon as We Are Born We Start to DieAppellation Before Christening5Storkmaking a manblonde boyepiphanyTrigger WarningPentecostPastoral of the Upland SouthCullingJeremiadThe Two Near-Deaths of My FatherLike the Resurrection of RoseanneVanitasThe Position of the Sun in the SkyFar CryAttritionThe Year We MetNo ideas but in objectsThe FutureThe Birth of the MoonAcknowledgments

"jump the gunis made of sharp and beautiful poems. There is a striking fullness to thelives, experiences, and landscapes within these pages, all toldwith arresting clarity—‘Enough of mirrors. They are water,’ Jennie Malboeuf writes. Asincisive as it is lyrical, as vast as it is intimate, this book is a force." —Chloe Honum, author of TheLantern Room"Jennie Malboeuf’s jump the gun is a bookof temporal distortions, sudden jumps, hesitations, and 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.It’s a formally thrilling collection, even as the content moves from lyricallybeautiful to starkly brutal. ‘I’m so tired of the pattern of snow then rain.Irony after irony, your / suffering then mine handed / back and forth,’ Malboeufwrites, and I feel that tension, that inevitable ‘back and forth’ throughoutthe book, the closely observed violences enacted daily, directly presented,forcing us to look at ourselves, this world we’ve made. But even at its most unflinchinglyconflicted, with ‘The father in father clothes. / The mother in mother hair,’it’s filled with empathy, as this imperative to look, to remember, to see theworld’s violence and misfortune, is also to remind ourselves that it’s alsofilled with creation, continuance. It’s a deeply humane book, one I’ve beenutterly captivated by." —JohnGallaher, author of Brand New Spacesuit