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.

Other poems by Tami Haaland in Verse Daily:
June 21, 2004:  "Intertextuality" "It's how you bring your sadness..."

Books by Tami Haaland:

Other poems on the web by Tami Haaland:
Three poems
Five poems
"Longing"
"To My Mother"
"Last Trip Out"
"Goldeye, Vole"

About What Does Not Return:

"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

"What Does Not Return is remarkable—pity and common joy intermingling. The ceremony of language that poetry is carries throughout the book. We hear a lift in the writer's sentences and deft handling of pace in every poem. We see the entrance of light and the light that remains after the poem is finished, a mother's life put away. Our life's story is told, the end especially, with grave dignity. And, as it is with ceremonies, a sense of what is pure also remains, a sense that we are 'awake in ways' that we 'couldn't have sustained earlier.'"
—Carol Frost