If I Had Said Beauty Board Games working-class family distrusts his intellectual

working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his "foreign" wife

nourishing the babies with starlight on the journey

bring comfort

She can hear everyone around her

From Molly Knox Ostertag

If I Had Said Beauty Board Games working-class family distrusts his intellectualIf 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