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In this collection of portraits, the eye is the vital “lamp of the body,” a spiritual organ Jessie van Eerden uses to craft essays that are as much encounters as they are likenesses, as much being seen as seeing. The author’s religious tradition and the rural landscape of Terra Alta, West Virginia are two backgrounds that are neither chosen nor fully understood, but van Eerden’s attention to these matters becomes its own form of devotion, a longing to see and to believe—the longing itself taking on the robustness of faith.