Bittering the Wound

by Jacqui Germain

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637680568
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	10/20/2022
Series:	CAAPP Book Prize
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction Douglas Kearney vii

On This Day 7

Thine Eyes, Thine Eyes 9

By the Grace of the Gaze 10

What We Purged before the Fight 11

For the Street That Held Us 12

On Courting the Fire 14

A List of Items Recovered from Protesters 15

What Is Known as Paranoia or Maladjusted Self-Defense 16

Nat Turner Comes to the Highway Action 18

We Called It a "War" Because It Was Useful, or Alternate Names for Tear Gas 20

The Streetlights Christened Us Saved (or At Least Salvageable) 21

Flatland 23

On the Chemical Properties & Uses of Dried Blood 24

For the Hooked Knife 26

A Series of Proofs, Explained 28

Self-Portrait Framed in Life between Protests 29

Terrible and So, So Alive 30

How the Fires Got Misnamed 31

The One Where They Watch the Director's Cut Because It Has an Edgier Ending 32

Self-Portrait Standing in a Field of Text Messages, All Sent and All Blooming Unanswered 33

The Grill Shop as an Armory 35

Oh, the Love We Had Back Then Survived the Smoke 36

Homebound 38

All Ash, An Anointing 42

How to Make South Grand a Ghost Town 43

American Fear: Director's Cut 46

Obscenities, but as a Prayer 50

Dripping Villanelle for the Burned Walgreens, QuikTrip, Prime Beauty, et al. 51

Ulcer (with Footnotes) 52

I Bend and the Tender Joint Buckles 53

Kindling 55

It Didn't Rain Much That August, but After 58

Pick One, It Says 59

Brick-Made and Steady 61

Still Unbuttoned & Unbothered: On Imagining That Freedom Probably Feels Like Getting the Itis 63

Acknowledgments 65

Editorial Reviews

Every poem held me right where I was, a place also called the United States, but more specifically, in my Black life. And I am grateful to her 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 United States, that she won’t vanish before the headlights in her rearview do. . . . a singular work of poetry. I call it an unflinching lyric of living under brutal powers that insist 'Black life' is an oxymoron.

Douglas Kearney

Finalist

2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Awards

"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 US, 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

From the Publisher