Billie Tadros

Graft Fixation Billie Tadros

Billie R. Tadros's Graft Fixation is fascinated by what comes together after a break-it's never quite the old form, but it's not fully a new one, either. The poems work around a car crash and subsequent injury in scattered, piecemeal forms, mirroring the way trauma isn't digested all at once or in a simple, understandable manner. The speaker knows they will never be who they used to be, but they seek a new agency, a fresh way to conceive of their identity in relation to and transcending the body. These poems are frantic and jagged, but they move towards an evolution. - Ruth Baumann, author of Thornwork




Graft Fixation takes apart the legal and medical language surrounding injury in a car crash, turns those words over and over, and reassembles this multi-layered language with a mixture of angry grief and intense playfulness. The resulting poems interrogate our understanding of bodies, especially women's bodies, through collisions of language and form: human/auto body, sexual/moving violation, good/bad pain. No description of this book could prepare you. Read it, and let it take you apart. - Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other