FACE CUT OUT FOR LOCKET is Jenn Blair's fourth collection of poetry. Her previous collections are MALCONTENT (winner of American Popular Culture's Press Americana Poetry Prize), THE SHEEP STEALER (Hyacinth Girl Press), and ALL THINGS ARE ORDERED (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published in such journals as RATTLE, the KENYON REVIEW, COPPER NICKEL, PEMBROKE MAGAZINE, the BERKLEY POETRY REVIEW, ATTICUS REVIEW, SOUTHAMPTON REVIEW, CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW, APPALACHIAN REVIEW, the SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW, NEW SOUTH, and the TULANE REVIEW among others. A former recipient of Broad River Press's Ron Rash Poetry Prize and a Dorothy B. Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, she teaches writing at Lander University, Lee University, and the University of Georgia.
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
