Billie R. Tadros’ inter: burial places is at once like a confession and a chant, carrying us through a narrative of seeking, something lost, desire, full of language like “your lips always decanting like prayer.” It feels urgent and dark and betwixt what was and what will be—even the poem titles play with sound and definition. “Everything I know about layers lies your body,” and “I love you irrationally. You love me like rationing.” are love letter to the turn of language, meaning, and the she in these poems. This is a masterful play at word and line and poem, a cut and stitched love song written in music and ash and heart meat. (Porkbelly Press, 2016) » available in our shop
excerpt
about the poet
Billie R. Tadros is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a graduate of the MFA program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of another chapbook, Containers (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in The Boiler, The Collapsar, Gigantic Sequins, Horse Less Review, Kindred, Menacing Hedge, Tupelo Quarterly, Wicked Alice, Word Riot, and others, and in the anthologies Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Press, 2013), Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). A poet-scholar with research interests in feminist theory, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and disability studies, she is also currently working on a narrative research project exploring the gendered and sexual implications of traumatic injuries to women runners and seeking to articulate a feminist poetics of the injured female body. You can find her at www.BillieRTadros.com and on Twitter at @BillieRTadros.
about the cover artist
Joline Costello Hartig received her B.F.A. in Printmaking and Art Education from Northern Kentucky University. After several years of teaching K-12 Art, she chose to stay at home raising her four children. She has recently started an after school art program at her children’s school and works in her home studio in the beautiful hills of Camp Springs, Kentucky. She inherited her printing press from her mother, who was also a local printmaker and landscape artist. This heritage serves as strong inspiration. Joline continues to pursue making abstracted images that reflect a spirituality and concern for nature and our environment. She has exhibited her work over the years in many group shows and is deeply involved in keeping the printmaking tradition alive in Northern Kentucky.
Cover art: “Clear Signals,” monotype, 20 x 20 inches
books from other presses
Containers (dancing girl press, 2014)
Porkbelly Press 