“Jennie Malboeuf’s jump the gun is a book of 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 lyrically beautiful 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,’ Malboeuf writes, and I feel that tension, that inevitable ‘back and forth’ throughout the 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 unflinchingly conflicted, 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 the world’s violence and misfortune, is also to remind ourselves that it’s also filled with creation, continuance. It’s a deeply humane book, one I’ve been utterly captivated by.”
—John Gallaher, author of Brand New Spacesuit