Jennie Malboeuf – författare

The mind and the body. The heavens and earth. God and animal. The speaker in God had a body considers how the image of a higher power is presented to her, beginning with a Catholic upbringing in Kentucky. Speckled with stars and peopled with creatures, these poems employ a trinity of sequences that address a present, past, and possible future—from a troubled reckoning with belief to loss and promise still ahead.In this debut collection from Jennie Malboeuf, we observe undercurrents of violence and power, the dynamics of memory, gender, marriage, and miscarriage. At times, God is brutal. At times, delicate. Through true stories of animal savagery, God had a body unravels human behavior and undoes the opaque and cryptic mysteries of faith.

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.”