In Jenn Blair’s FACE CUT OUT FOR LOCKET, voices of the past and present reckon with violence, guilt, doubt, and grief, even as they hope for grace. Blair reveals the rural landscape’s hard truths along with its beauty in this place where “anybody would tremble.” With taut, unsparing language, she exhorts the reader to “retie your skittish mind to its/ stern tether of sinew and shank,” to pay attention to “porch-light, leaf-litter, bone rot.” I am grateful to Blair’s exacting eye for bearing witness to the anguish residing in each of us.

—Carrie Green, author of STUDIES OF FAMILIAR BIRDS

Jenn Blair’s FACE CUT OUT FOR LOCKET opens with “earth clinging / to the roots of wild.” In this poem, the wild takes the form of onions, but throughout her collection, such wild exists in a world which is often too gorgeous, too trying to measure. “What do I do / what do I do / but there, at day’s end, / wordlessly nod?” However, Blair’s poems are committed to documenting the “light pour[ing] through,” her poems full of shimmer amidst the urge to decipher it all. “Have I ever done / it even once. Willingly let go. / Of anything?” These wonderful poems are a cartography of witness, of beauty, of experience.

—Sara Henning, author of VIEW FROM TRUE NORTH and TERRA INCOGNITA​

Reading this collection is a pilgrimage, a pensive path, of hard travel, largely rural, through 19th century and modern voices, sustained by minor comforts—moments of tenderness—“speckles of light.” Blair’s careful discernment of heartbreaking violences, large and small, is executed with exquisite imagery and masterful idiom. Carrying the burden of mortality, and keen to the many ways that we fail one another, her narrators often offer counter-odes: poems of observant lives, luminously lyrical in their suffering.

—Heather Matesich Cousins, author of SOMETHING IN THE POTATO ROOM