Whittling a New Face in the Dark is a call to arms for language to rise above its inadequacy. DJ Dolack’s poems are born from moments we must work hard to forget: the child’s first funeral dirge; an empty, fluorescent-lit gas station in winter; at the bar, two drinks too far, ashamed and yet too aware of our surroundings. The speakers in this debut collection live in fear that the intimacy of solitude is indeed pornographic. Meanwhile, Dolack’s lines are laced with a macabre, needle-sharp humor offering hymns of affliction, loss, and light: no matter the darkness, the pearl-handled whittling knife moves to do its job.