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 hiddenrecesses 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 thesepoems wrestles with the everyday fears and realities we often try to ignore:the complex expectationsplaced on young girls and mothers alike, the illusion of childhood innocence,and the very realconsequences of our environmental destruction.Split into twosections—with poems that layer blood-soaked images between close-ups of thebody and domestic life—this collection deftly illustrates the beauty that can befound in tragedy, thefragility of the natural world, and the resilience of the human relationshipsthat fill it.To read jump the gunis 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 thesame. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons.”
