etc.
“Salient and provoking, sensuous and cerebral, Jennie Malboeuf's poems locate holiness in the living, dead, partial and whole creations of this planet: among them a 'cow's eye . . . so pretty I squinched hard/and wished it back to the socket'; a 'redback spider [that] throws himself/into the hollow fangs of his beloved' ; a dead whale whose 'mouth hung open/like a friendly doorway,' until 'that certain scent of ending' makes the human fantasy of welcome clear. Yes, we are like the animals—whether tiny or enormous—but make no mistake: they are themselves, worthy of our attention and our reverence, rarely reflecting us. As Malboeuf puts it, 'the birds we kept/in cages fought any mirror.' The poet laces her observant news of these encounters with a biblical re-envisioning, as well as with her own peculiar wit: for example, in 'The Cow's Eye,' Malboeuf notes that 'Daddy picked it up from the stockyards . . . He said it'd help with my science project.' In another encounter, the speaker's father has a run-in with a mosquito: 'at the height of an anecdote, a mosquito, a female, / flew inside his head.' The humor there is spiky and profound. At the doctor's office, the daughter gets to see 'the mold of hot wax they poured to pull her—preserved in flight—right out.' In 'The Hydra,' that organism is described as 'a penis-shaped creature with a spider/topping its head.' This poet thrives amid and among other bodies, observing, feeling, and listening, trying very hard not to cut life short or diminish its sacredness with fallible descriptions, while acknowledging with her striking wit our human-centric eye. I relish these poems and will return to them for their stories, their humor, and the ways they intertwine language and life.” —Lisa Williams, author of Gazelle in the House
“There is a fierce spirituality and mordant wit in God had a body, Jennie Malboeuf's first book of poems. Here is a poet with a transformative vision of divine and earthly enterprise as well as a sharp eye for the repercussions of physical detail. Malboeuf's use of enactments and embodiments—actions and images—startle and awaken the reader to a powerful new voice in American poetry. What a glorious debut collection.” —Stuart Dischell, author of Children with Enemies
“jump the gun is made of sharp and beautiful poems. There is a striking fullness to the lives, experiences, and landscapes within these pages, all told with arresting clarity—‘Enough of mirrors. They are water,’ Jennie Malboeuf writes. As incisive as it is lyrical, as vast as it is intimate, this book is a force.” —Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room
“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
