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My debut full-length poetry book has been published!

Here are some reviews!

Tamara Hattis’s innovative debut, Colors of My Pain, interrogates the constructs of beauty, gender and selfhood as much as our nation’s failures of empathy and curiosity. In a visionary approach to mapping the unseen triumphs of daily survival, these synesthetic lyrics layer exquisite shades of pathos, humor and grief against a tapestry of relentless, debilitating pain. I find myself laughing aloud in communion with this irrepressible human voice, standing up and shouting in raw moments of personal growth and gratitude. More than being restored, I am changed by Hattis’s courageous work, which reminds me of what poetry is capable of and why we can't live without it.

      — Chad Sweeney, poetry professor at California State University San                Bernardino, author of Little Million Doors and Arranging the                   Blaze

Brilliant and stunningly beautiful. Exquisite and painful.

      —Francesca Lia Block

Tamara Hattis uses the colorful, sensual conceit of makeup products to guide the reader through her lived world of chronic pain. We are seduced, entranced by textured visions, and this allows us to make contact with the raw burn of her despair, as well as the bloom of redemption hatched within that darkness. The layout with its great variety of stand-alone poems showcases her wit, her lyricism, her lightness and heaviness, her biography and philosophy—the naked rivering dance of her voice. And by virtue of its multifaceted compound lens, this collection opens out onto the American cultural landscape itself, speaking of the invisibility of the disability community in majority culture, the painful objectification of women in society, and the narcissism at war with deep-felt ideology at this country's core.

     —John Spudich, Psy.D, artist, and writer

  

In Colors of My Pain, Tamara Hattis uses descriptions of made-up makeup products to give readers an insight into her private world. Her searing honesty takes us on a journey through profound hope and profound despair — a multi-layered exploration of what it’s like to deal with a chronic pain and what it takes to create a meaningful life against all odds.

     —Cynthia Anderson, author of Desert Dweller, Waking Life, and co-               editor of A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and              Ravens

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