Was Body: Poems

Reading Was Body provided a jolt I didnt realize I needed. Using tropes of iteration and erasure medical mythologies nude portraiture phantasmagoria and theme and variation on phrases ranging from cellar door to lighter fluid Billie R. Tadros bewitches us with languages associative properties. Fun House Mirror Sonnets? Here. The emotional semantics of Hollandaise sauce? Here. These are poems of loss and reckoning; yet these nimble poems also claim life in tooth and claw and the possibilities of love. A Ferris wheel spelling/appellations a speaker observes bulb color. Im grateful to take the ride. --Sandra Beasley It feels dangerous to build an entire collection around a single love affair but Tadros is willing to take the risk. As she writes Most fever has reason and so/there is cause for heat. And in her collection Was Body she mines that heat--the highs and lows the desperate longings and the even more desperate fulfillments of those longings--to create a collection that circles echoes and twists. Fraught with the themes of obsession suicide and self-harm the book nonetheless contains moving love poems the best of which are tight sonnets that recall the power of Marilyn Hackers intimate portraits of two women in love and in bed. But like all good love stories this one casts long shadows into which Tadros steps with an eerie comfort: you can/elegize the dying with their own/words Ive been wearing yours/as a veil. --Keetje Kuipers This invigorating collection brings such stark & stellar clarity to the language of grief that its sometimes difficult to know if Tadros is deftly flexing in magical realism or were finally encountering a poet who can give it to us straight. Either way Was Body remains a fresh & haunting reintroduction to the corporeal form as a wilderness for word play & reclamation. --Meg Day Billie R. Tadros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Theatre and an affiliated faculty member in the Womens and Gender Studies Program at The University of Scranton. She is the author of two other books of poems The Tree We Planted and Buried You In (Otis Books 2018) and Graft Fixation (Gold Wake Press 2021). You can find more of her and her work at www.BillieRTadros.com.