Live from Prairie Lights | Jake Fournier- 'Punishment Bag'

Jake Fournier will read from his new poetry collection, Punishment Bag. Described as "In conversation with collections like John Ashbery's Some Trees and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium," Punishment Bag is "a daring poetry debut that carves its own unsettling territory" (simonandschuster.com). D. A. Powell, author of Low Hanging Fruit, praises Punishment Bag as "a book marvelously held together by the attempt to see what can often only be felt," while Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of Aux/Arc Trypt Ich: Poppycock and Assphodel and Winter; A Night of Dark Trees, says: "With a delicate and complex ear, a sly wit, and acute self-awareness, these poems move like a snake in the grass, muscled and inexplicable. The gift here is in the unsettling, in the eliding slippage and its attendant, alighting mind. We are left a bit dazed and dazzled, lead to and left entranced at the eerie heart where that dearth of understanding flows from and moves us all."

Jake Fournier is a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 7:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
15 South Dubuque Street, Iowa City, IA 52240
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