About the Book

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.

Praise for Bittering the Wound

Winner of the 2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Featured in Electric Lit’s “7 Poetry Books Written From Activism’s Front Lines”

Bittering the Wound is a deep and careful storytelling that comes directly from Germain’s experiences during the Ferguson uprisings. Germain has a continuous focus on protest as a form of love: for one’s community, for one’s ancestors, for Blackness, for oneself. The city is alive, the streets are alive, the protestors are alive and embodied—and they are all asking the question, “How do we care for each other when we live in institutions of violence?”
—Electric Lit

With gut-hitting words, she [Germain] forces us to taste the raw kick of a police boot, to feel the panicked thump-thump in our hearts when a U.S.-made tear gas canister lands between our feet, acrid and hot in our eyes.
—Sherell Barbee, In These Times

. . . Every poem held me right where I was, a place also called the U.S., but more specifically, in my Black life. And I am grateful to her [Germain] for that, as grateful as I am for her harrowing actions in that city. Beyond gratitude, however, I feel astonishment for what she demands from her lines, from her sentences, the images she reels, the force of her skepticism, commitment, her love, that she makes it home in a place called the U.S., that she won’t vanish before the headlights in her rearview do. . . . I call it an unflinching lyric of living under brutal powers that insist “Black life” is an oxymoron. I call it by its name: Jacqui Germain’s Bittering the Wound, winner of the CAAPP Poetry Prize. I call myself lucky to have read it.
—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho

Jacqui Germain is a poet and journalist living in St. Louis, Missouri. She’s the author of the poetry collection Bittering the Wound (winner of the 2021 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize, Autumn House Press), which was awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2024 by Claremont Graduate University. She’s also the author of […]

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