Billie R. Tadros

“Framing The Tree We Planted as tree growth might show precisely how unlike a tree we grow after trauma. In this case, the suicide of a father. That’s why titles rotate in and out, be it unchanged (as in “Preservation,” “Sign,” “Symptom”) or with minute changes (as in “Hypnopomp, 2008” and “Hypnopomp, 2007”). It fits the intrusive flashbacks of PTSD and mirrors the seeming contradiction of circling the trauma in order to explain and avoid it simultaneously. It also fits the underlying saudade of the titular poem where “obituaries…are the outlines of people,/leaving life-shaped holes in want/of what makes memory.” The lyrical reminiscence is buried so deep in these lines that it would fit in the mouth of Hamlet. Looked at this way, Tadros’ debut reads a bit like the inside of Hamlet’s head; tender, snarky, and laced with biting irony. These “life-shaped holes” – “exit wounds” as they’re purposefully called in the “Epilogue” – can be seen as absences that refer to an absence and the presence of that absence. Emerald borer tunnels in the psychological ash tree.”

“ I fingered the contours of the trunk, pondering the novelty of the spaces formed at the places where the grooves of my skin met the grooves of the bark, from its base to its branches.

branch: a something, another way to explain what happened to us, to him, when he left–growth.”