"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. . . . It’s a book that insists both on the deep trauma and violence that occurred and the community care that is woven into every moment. I really appreciate Germain’s focus also on what happens after a big movement—when the cameras leave and organizers and activists are left to deal with the trauma, with the intimate aspects of a very public story." —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 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

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. She is the author of Bittering the Wound, winner of the 2024 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, and the chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore. As a journalist, she has published original reporting, political commentary, and feature profiles in The Nation, The Guardian, VICE, and more. Most recently, Germain was selected to be the 2021-2022 Economic Security Project Fellow at Teen Vogue, covering issues of class and economic inequality at the intersections of race and gender.