ISBN 978-1-59924-232-3

Or, send a check or money order made out to Finishing Line Press, with "Gunshy" in the description/memo field, to:

Finishing Line Press
P.O. Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324

"Gunshy is a compelling book, packed with jolting, tender, intensely vivid and unforgettable poems by a poet with perfect aim, unblinking and dead-on accuracy."

-Paul Violi

"Sarah Ruth Jacobs is adept at ever-shifting voices, at mixing the eerie and the everyday in ways that are at once disturbing and strangely. These poems are forceful, gritty, and a little bit surreal. They're also unabashedly erotic, always returning to those places where chaos and violence are, at most, half-successfully concealed beneath the surfaces of love, sex, and self-control. This is fine, memorable writing."

-Kevin Prufer, editor of Pleiades

From Gunshy:

Living Among Thieves

Our shoulders are hunched
from jamming locks, from hacking
pale computer screens,
from lone triumph.

There are seven of us in all, the
youngest's stubble still soft.

I, the only female, am called
to comb the others' hair,
sometimes bring myself
into rooms where one or
another of them is lashed
with sobs, gladly replace
his old love, losing my own
hollows to his heady flood.

And I know nothing purer
than a thief's eyes lit up with
liquor, as on Saturdays when
we all sit naked about the
table planning our next heist,
my straight dark hair puddling
around each breast. The kitchen
is an island of light miles
away, and though I'm only
nineteen I'm everyone's
mother and mistress, my
thighs never cooling, a
different part of me burning
off each time, their husky
voices calling me a new
name every day of the week.