It feels dangerous to build an entire collection around a single love affair, but Tadros is willing to take the risk. As she writes, “Most fever has reason, and so/there is cause for heat.” And in her collection Was Body, she mines that heat—the highs and lows, the desperate longings and the even more desperate fulfillments of those longings—to create a collection that circles, echoes, and twists. Fraught with the themes of obsession, suicide, and self-harm, the book nonetheless contains moving love poems, the best of which are tight sonnets that recall the power of Marilyn Hacker’s intimate portraits of two women in love and in bed. But like all good love stories, this one casts long shadows, into which Tadros steps with an eerie comfort: “you can/elegize the dying with their own/words, I’ve been wearing yours/as a veil.”

— Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms