Praise for
What to Wear Out

“What to Wear Out is a fiercely perceptive journey through the complexities of girlhood and womanhood, oftentimes devastating in its exploration of personal and societal grief. Jen DeGregorio creates a powerful anthem of survival through delicate portrayals of people and their tender intimacies. Endlessly evocative, I couldn’t put the book down. Its song carries on; its song endures.”

—Tina Chang, author of Hybrida (W. W. Norton)

“What to Wear Out is a brilliant collection—honest and brave. This book invites us into a life, peeling away layers of artifice, refusing to wear masks to hide behind. The book draws us in, and we cannot deny the powerful vision we are offered, the truths we find in the poems—and what these poems help us find in ourselves.”

—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, author of Writing Poetry to Save Your Life (Guernica)

“Short on cash, desperate on Craigslist, contemplating kidney donation and divorce, complicity and debt, the speaker in Jen DeGregorio’s What to Wear Out is perceptive, unflinching, obsessed with trying to see clearly. Hungry and wary, she knows ‘the world is ending, after all’ and also that ‘nostalgia’s/a drug, it’s a cop out’— that absolution is temporary, and that precarity and desire rhyme. Wielding the line break with thrilling precision, this poet swerves us always toward the heat, the difficult heart. I read this collection on the edge of my seat. A searing and accomplished debut.”

—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer (Ecco Press)

“What to Wear Out, turns and turns, like a bright hard candy in the mouth, the ways the self can be shaped, masked, glossed, dressed, undressed, worn out into the world, and worn threadbare by the relentless forces at work on a woman’s hours in the world. It is an engrossing collection that captures, with ferocious accuracy, a 90’s youth: its surfeit of Jennifers in malls, Jennifers at sleepovers, its submerged violences, hovering anorexic scalpel and patriarchal aggressions, all the while yoking this past to present—pandemic and marriage and true-crime podcasts and gig economy and student loans synched up to menstrual cycles—as with the childhood landline number the speaker still remembers, still dials. The breadth this book is able to conjure, curate and examine produces an inimitable portrait of ‘near misses / and augurs we can only read / in retrospect.”

—Rosalie Moffett, author of Nervous System (Ecco Press)

Book cover image: (c) Alec Soth/Magnum Photos