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Join us on Zoom on Tuesday, November 29 at 7 PM as poet Jacqui Germain reads from her debut collection, Bittering the Wound. This is the December selection of the Poetry Book Club.
A firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest.
Jacqui Germain’s debut collection, Bittering the Wound, is a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Part documentation, part conjuring, this collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them.
Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes—from mid-protest to post-protest—and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye.
Bittering the Wound was selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize.
Jacqui Germain is a poet, journalist, and former labor and student organizer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Germain has received fellowships from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Poetry Foundation’s Emerging Poets Incubator. Her poetry background also includes several years of competing in national slam poetry competitions at the collegiate and adult level. In addition to her chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, published in 2016 by Button Poetry, her poems have been published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, The Rumpus, Anomaly, and elsewhere, in addition to being anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3, and others publications. Bittering the Wound is her debut collection. For more information: https://www.
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