Heather Warren
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:16 PDT

Short Jabs is a collection of poems exploring themes of gender, sexuality, love and violence, ultimately highlighting various contexts in which these thematic issues intersect with one another. Whether it is violence within a same-sex relationship, violence between the self and the self's identified queerness in question, the violence of a relationship enduring heartache, or the violence that forces its mark on the identified woman's body, Short Jabs argues for the fluidity explicit within - and beyond - this thematic spectrum. Simultaneously - through lyric and the use of rhythmic and figurative language - Short Jabs rejects normative notions of poetic formatting and utilizes the page as a piece of technology to notate musicality. Stylistically and thematically, this collection attempts to deliver the feeling of a short jab, one poem at a time.