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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

Winner of the 2021 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Douglas Kearney

“What Germain does, again and again in these bright burning poems, is refuse presumption. The specificity with which she renders existing in a state of protest, of action, of shows of strength, seems to me to insist on experience, on the mess of being there, in a place where one must bitterly acknowledge the utility of bleeding.

This, too, is a matter of Black life.”

— Douglas Kearney, author of Sho