Had I, I Would Have, by Savannah Grant

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This chapbook is an exploration of loss: losing identity, losing a previous sense of freedom, losing a life (or many). How does one come to a place of such loss both within and without the Self? This is a theme explored in a different context in Savannah’s companion chapbook entitled at the end of gospel. In Had I, I Would Have, through abstract narrative readers are guided along a fragmented and rarely lucid trail of trains, snow, half-remembered summers, and death both figurative and literal.

Do not worry if some of the poems feel inaccessible. That is the point: they grasp at shreds of reality while living in a mental state of being unable to grasp reality; they do not live in the visible, accessible world. They live in memory that can’t be remembered. They speak from an identity that isn’t there. It starts out in a parking lot at night and only gets worse. From a clinical standpoint, they are about dissociation and depression. It is gritty and visceral, it is self-referential, it is not concrete. Written over the course of four years, this chapbook is meant to warp time until you do not know where, or who, you are anymore. Good luck in there!

Savannah Grant is an artist, poet, and house cleaner in Western MA. She has been published in Sixfold online journal three times before, and has won awards for her writing. She has art hanging in various local galleries, mostly etchings. In her spare time she likes bike rides, spending time in her close-knit community, and selling vintage clothes on eBay.