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WHAT DOES NOT RETURN

WHAT DOES NOT RETURN

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9981963-6-7

Pub Date: Mar. 2018

Pages: 80


By Tami Haaland


Tami Haaland’s exquisite and necessary book of poems, What Does Not Return, is a rare account of the experience we have come to call, rightly, care-giving. With ritual attentiveness, in small, deeply considered gestures, in words exchanged at the altar of grief, she shows us what it might mean to honor and celebrate what is given to us and what is taken away. From the moving first poems, in which she witnesses her mother’s daily diminishment and eventual death from dementia, to the last, when she finds herself searching silently for an escaped rabbit in the night, these poems remind us that, if we are here, we are all “graveside,” sitting “on the edge, legs dangling.” We are here on the verge of tears, where the daylight is.

—Melissa Kwasny


    Haaland’s magic is in her consistency. She steers clear of flash-in-the-pan poems to offer something greater. For the caretakers of 5.5 million sufferers of Alzheimer’s/dementia, Haaland’s poetry serves as an empathetic companion. She offers strength through calmness. Hope through accepting life’s tensions.

    —Austin Bennett, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts


    Here is the crux of Haaland’s writing: the interconnectedness of all things. Life and death, joy and misery, all tumbling together in an endless cycle. Her work is the pulse we share with all living things. It is the light pouring into a dark room.

    –Anna Alarcon, Poetry International



    Tami Haaland is the author of two previous books of poetry, When We Wake in the Night and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award from Story Line Press. Her poems have appeared in High Desert Journal, Consequence, Ascent, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and many other publications. Her work has also been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. Haaland received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council in 2012 and served as Montana’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She teaches at Montana State University Billings.

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