Graft Fixation

Praise for Graft Fixation

The juxtaposing of the institutionalized version of the story with the lived and internalized experience of the injured and reconstructed body makes clear how much we need this important work, this excavation of how we are shaped by our defining bodily experiences. Tadros skillfully grafts verse, erasures, found language, institutional documents and darkly mysterious cross-sections of flesh and bone as she viscerally hones a unique genre: feminist injury poetics. Like the beautiful photographic abstractions of her injuries, Tadros dissects with MRI precision layers of eroticism, consent, gender, self-destruction and forgiveness to the very marrow of language, where she confronts the secret roots of pain and longing. Contradiction is embraced with clarity and wit in this elegant hybrid rendering, her reportage, fiction, self-reference unflinchingly parsed. Tadros emerges a cyborgian narrator for a twenty-first century literature on the enigmatic nature of injury.

— Kathline Carr, author of Miraculum Monstrum

To serve as witness to your own broken body. To press your wounds to paper to see if the tissue will take. Through debriding the sources of injury — accident reports, MRI images, and status updates — Tadros reconstructs the injury narrative into a moving body of work. GRAFT FIXATION both breaks and brakes me. 

— Christine Friedlander, author of Avant Gauze

In Graft Fixation, Billie R. Tadros mines the weary syntaxes of bureaucracy for parallel purposes: to construct a new language, and to reconstruct a body. “I’m still / hyperventilating trying to // return to my body”: through erasures, samplings, and memories, Tadros suggests that when our bodies are injured, the private is made public. We are studied, watched, consoled, and cajoled. Graft Fixation offers a unique route back home to ourselves.

— Nick Ripatrazone, author of Longing for an Absent God

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 Parse

 

Graft Fixation is an intense and powerful piece of work, truly a ‘cyborg’ of medical and emotional language woven together. You can feel the weight of the physical injury, the cold finality of the medical documents, the crushing blow of losing something you love. It shows us the reality of adjusting to a ‘new’ body and raises the question of loving it even when it doesn’t move or feel the same. Graft Fixation reminds us that healing isn’t always getting back to where we were but working with the new life we have. There are two stories here: the first is the cold, definitive medical truth; and the other is the raw, heart-breaking, uncertain truth of what life turns into now. I finished reading Graft Fixation feeling incredible respect and admiration for what Tadros has done to show how coping with pain can be a complex journey.

—   Rachael Steil, author of Running in Silence: My Drive for Perfection and the Eating Disorder That Fed It

I got chills the first time I heard Billie R. Tadros read pieces from this project, and I’m in awe of this book now. Graft Fixation takes apart the legal and medical language surrounding the poet’s injury as a passenger 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