Doubleback Books announces the release of Billie R. Tadros’s The Tree We Planted and Buried You In. Tadros’s first full-length collection, The Tree We Planted and Buried You In, is a book-length elegy for her father, who died by suicide in 2005. The text is, in many ways, an illness narrative. With repeated titles including “Symptom” and “Exit Wound,” the form and structure of the text witness the importance of contextualizing discussions of mental illness, suicide, and violence in the United States, within the larger body of—and discourse on—literature and illness. Tadros illustrates our connection to nature with powerful simplicity: “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.”
Yanyi, author of The Year of Blue Water, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, writes that The Tree We Planted is “more than a collection of one-off beauties … this book is a memorial to a person, an answer to the Odyssey’s invocation: ‘Sing, Muse, of a complicated man.’ Tadros does so with care and steady craft.”
Justin Goodman writes that “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. The lyrical reminiscence is buried so deep in the lines that it would fit in the mouth of Hamlet. Looked at this way, Tadros’s debut reads a bit like the inside of Hamlet’s head: tender, snarky, and laced with biting irony … Emerald borer tunnels in the psychological ash tree.”
You can download your copy for free at DoublebackBooks.com.
Billie R. Tadros is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Theatre at the University of Scranton. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is the author of three books of poems: Graft Fixation (Gold Wake Press, 2020), Was Body (Indolent Books, 2020), and The Tree We Planted and Buried You In (Otis Books, 2018/Doubleback Books, 2026); and three chapbooks: Am/Are I (Francis House, 2020), inter: burial places (Porkbelly Press, 2016), and Containers (Dancing Girl Press, 2014).
