Tea Gerbeza, How I Bend Into More

 

. . . . . . . . . . . …. .                  beginning

1999
a walk-in clinic

 

 

                  four years after
  escape from       Yugoslavian
Civil War                four years after
                               confrontations
  with death.

 

                  My parents believe
                    my surgery worse
. . . . . .                              . .

                        than war

From Regina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza comes the full-length debut How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection that curves into multiple articulations around childhood scoliosis, reminiscent of similar work I’ve seen by Gatineau, Quebec filmmaker and poet Jennifer Mulligan, a poem or two from her chapbook …like nailing jello to a tree… (above/ground press, 2007). Through Gerbeza, much as Mulligan’s poems, a staggered line runs down the centre of pages, of poems, composing a line of bent spine with text on either side, offering visual approximations of “parentheses,” as Gerbeza’s poem “glossary of parentheses” visualizes, “around my spine [.]” Constructed as intimate notes on childhood illness, family response, suffering, privacy and disability poetics, the poems are built on the foundations of the narrative “I,” occasionally as curved or curled, writing a sequence of notes on effect, response and experience. “I take a photo to post / instead find myself reading pamphlets / about girls with Scoliosis. Images / tell me     │ (    )ing helps the right / kind of patient, the right / patient will avoid / surgery, this the body’s goal.” Across swirls and scatterings of cut-ups, photographs, clippings and a staccato of scars, Gerbeza collages fragments of text and image, leaning into the text-laden photographed object so prevalent in the work of Toronto-based poet Kate Siklosi [see my review of her first book here]. Her lean might be visual, but the foundation of the collection sits in text. “If I don’t exist Scoliosis doesn’t either,” she writes. Further on: “I explore territory I’ve long kept private / in crescents curled with no open centres [.]”

What is interesting about Gerbeza’s line, the visual of which runs through the collection as an approximation, a textual stand-in for her own spine, is how it holds as foundation through the collection, both through subject matter and text: everything within the collection is set in relation to that single element. As the poem “Clearing Up the Question about ‘My Suffering’” begins: “If suffering is private │ then why should I explain? / if I explain, do I start from my head │ to my toes [.]” She offers notes on the spine, so that she might write through it, into it.