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On Monday, December 19th at 6pm the Poetry Book Club will be discussing the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize, Jacqui Germain’s Bittering the Wound.
We will be meeting inside the bookstore on the College St. level (upstairs). Part of the meeting will be devoted to reading selected poems that we find meaningful from the text along with a dialogue around those and other themes that flow through the book. The book is available now to pre-purchase online with a special 20% discount for Book Club members using the coupon: BOOKCLUB at checkout for your discount. It is also available for purchase in-person beginning October 20th, also with a 20% discount if you mention that you are a member of the book club.
If you would like to sign-up for the Poetry Book Club, please email Robin Glossner at events@odysseybks.com and join us at the next meeting!
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.
Jacqui Germain is a poet, journalist, and former labor and student organizer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of the chapbook When the Ghosts Come Ashore, and her poems have been published in The Rumpus, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Offing, Muzzle Magazine, Anomaly, and elsewhere, and they have been anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3, and others.
The Poetry Book Club meets once-a-month on the third Monday of the month at 6pm at The Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College Street, South Hadley, MA
