READING | THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 | 7 PM | FREE
UNM Creative Writing Program presents Jake Fournier
Part of the Russo Reading Series
The UNM Creative Writing Program invites you to join them at FUSION | The Cell on September 24 at 7 PM for a reading by Jake Fournier, author of Punishment Bag. After the reading, Fournier will give a brief audience Q&A. Books will be available for purchase!
"Punishment Bag reveals a 'natural piety' of rainbows that never bend, an elevation of poetic presence, and a lively game of chance and irony....Jake Fournier creates exceptional poignant promises and the curious temptation to reach into the punishment bag of his marvelous poetry." —Gerald Vizenor, author of Theatre of Chance: Native Celebrities of Nothing in an Existential Colony
Jake Fournier's debut collection, Punishment Bag (University of New Mexico Press | January 13, 2026), offers a new synthesis of experimental poetics and confessional intimacy. Emotionally vivid and intellectually playful, these luminous poems play out like pocket symphonies; there is as much depth in their music as in their silence. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Fournier asserts that poetry ought to live on the outskirts of comfortable understanding.
Punishment Bag, named after a “pedagogical instrument”—a creative tool Fournier used in the language classroom—is at once caustic and tender. As ghosts materialize at the periphery of late-night dialogues and spiritual seekers slide into hedonic disaffection, the collection wryly ironizes the human compulsion to discover and create meaning—to make language out of everything. Here, ordinary objects accrue bizarre, sacred resonance and sacred subjects are reduced to glossy advertisements.
The collection culminates in a piercing, Eliotic prose poem created from a destabilizing selection of autobiographical notes. Even as Fournier explains the experiences and chance encounters that supplied the raw material for his poetry, his writing bursts with unruly life. Tracing the growth of a poet’s mind, Punishment Bag extends its readers an irresistible invitation to delight in the tactile density of language, and, against a backdrop of ecocide and systemic injustice, to discover new ways to make meaning.
ABOUT JAKE FOURNIER
Jake Fournier is a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago and teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry has appeared in Annulet, Lana Turner, River Styx, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. This is his first book.
Author Photo: Eric Cousineau
UNM’s English Department offers a full array of creative writing workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Undergraduate students may register for introductory, intermediate, and advanced workshops in all three genres. Additionally, they are invited to attend readings sponsored by UNM’s Masters of Fine Arts Program and participate as readers on Blue Mesa Review. Qualifying undergraduates interested in pursuing creative writing on the graduate level are encouraged to work with a faculty mentor on a creative writing Honors Thesis. And every fall undergraduate creative writers compete for the prestigious Lena Todd Awards, a small cash stipend and the opportunity to share their work at the Works-in-Process Reading Series.
UNM’s MFA Program in Creative Writing is designed for graduate students committed to pursuing the writing life. This three-year degree combines studio-based workshops in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction with craft seminars and coursework in literature, teaching pedagogy, and professional writing.
Quality bar service provided by Safe House Distilling Co. and Teller Genuine Vodka.
