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IF I HAD SAID BEAUTY

IF I HAD SAID BEAUTY

$20.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-8-9

Pub Date: Spring 2025

Pages: 76


By Tami Haaland


If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland’s fourth collection of poetry, is dedicated to “known and unknown” ancestors. It explores the possible narratives and distant origins of what lies behind a sense of self—including recent and ancient DNA, recessive and dominant traits, mitochondrial underpinnings, and an intricate microbiome. Luminous and spare, the poems seek to unravel and speculate, document and lament what happens in a life and what might have been. While probing for definition in the mysteries of deep time, the poems are nevertheless grounded in encounters with wild and domestic life, intimate moments of loss and family connection, all of which intertwine to expand the meaning of “autobiography.”

    An autopsy in verse annotated with an Org Chart of the Self, If I Had Said Beauty ruminates on who we were meant to be and what we might yet become, beyond the cells of our genetic prisons with their double-helixed bars. The children our forebears didn’t have, the snipped-off doll’s hair that stubbornly won’t regrow, the presumed one-wayness of our conversations with the dead and artifacts that keep the chatter going both ways— all dangling strands we worry at, threads of family stories and nerve endings that don’t quite ever end. Tami Haaland maps them as far as they’ll go; some re-emerge on the far side of the page, and some simply wink out for now, awaiting new cartographers yet to be born.

    —Eric Heidle, Montana Arts Council


    Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections: What Does Not Return, When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room. Her poems have recently appeared in Fugue, Cutthroat, december, Cascadia, Healing the Divide and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown. She served as Montana’s Poet Laureate and has received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council as well as a Montana Governor’s Humanities Award. 

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