Therese Estacion, Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability

Pause. Replay. The amputee walks up the hill in slow motion. Pause. Replay. She does a somersault into the water. Pause, repeat. Pause, repeat again. They snowboard down a mountain.

While I was in the hospital, I scanned the internet for inspiration. Hoping to find photos of amputees living the way everyone lives on the internet, displaying their lives for public consumption freely. Warm smiles, wide-eyed. Wet and shiny. Opened, like a can filled with cream.

Zooming in on their prosthesis, zoom in drowsily envisioning what I would look like with their prosthetic legs on. Feel their freedom and excitement. Their flesh on my flesh. (“Inspiration Porn”)

I’d been looking forward to going through Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026), the second full-length title by Toronto writer and teacher Therese Estacion, following on the heels of her full-length poetry debut, Phantompains (Book*hug Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Self-described as a collection that “fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love,” Jelly, Baby is very much an extension of that poetry debut, exploring ableism, vulnerability and both the limitations and the possibilities of her own body. “All I know is that I am too tender for my own good,” she writes, “and I hate myself for it.” There’s such a lovely pacing to her sentences, her paragraphs, obviously one fueled through an attention to rhythm, sound and the line, articulating and clarifying an array of powerful feeling into a kind of music. Further in the collection, offering: “How do I live in a body that can never be separated from grief? Grief as a predominant state of being.”

Much as her debut collection did, Jelly, Baby is composed in sections—six self-contained essays: “Inspiration Porn,” “Once,” “Exploring this Aswang Complex,” “Jelly, Baby,” “My Prosthetic Legs” and “Post-Mortem”—yet very much a singular, book-length exploration and articulation around her own engagement with the world, and having to navigate the expectations and demands, dismissals and hostilities, of others. “Once, at a literary event,” she writes, as part of “Once,” “a poet handed me a book they co-wrote with another poet. The book’s publisher marketed the book as a book about language, speech, translation, and connection. But the first three poems of the book explored the concept of prosthesis, artificial limbs, and prosthetic legs as metaphors for something I cannot really make sense of, something I cannot understand since my visceral experience of prosthesis isn’t art. Instead, it is a fusion of frustration and anger and melancholy and all the fucked-up experiences I have accumulated over the years as an amputee.” She writes “once,” but these are experiences at a breaking point, dealing with the ignorance of others far too many times to let it slip by unchecked and unremarked.

Smart and determined, Estacion works through vulnerability and rage, fear and intimate grief in a collection composed in portions, almost as accumulated prose thought-breaths, but less as self-contained essays than a sense of something larger, broader and ongoing. “Where are we now as a culture?” she asks, further in the same essay. “How long has it been since people like me were locked up, sedated, lobotomized, ushered secretly in the underground tunnels of Ivy League schools so they could be experimented on—and murdered—by people like her? When I and other people with disabilities go out, is there an inherited feeling that pulsates through the ether that says to non-disabled folks, Who let these freaks out? Where is their nurse? The nun? The psychiatrist? Where are their parents? The infantiliziation we encounter is inescapable.”

However structured as singular essays, or even essay-chapters, I would put this compelling and inventive self-contained, singular work in the same hybrid/memoir book-length category as recent titles including Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here] or Kingston poet Sadiqa de Meijer’s In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Allowing for humour and rage, her own limitations and fury at the ignorance of others, Estacion is a clear-headed and powerful writer, and this is a compelling collection of fragments purposefully cohered into a magnificent tapestry. “All the things that make us vulnerable,” she writes, near the end of the title essay, “and easy to obliterate.” One would be good to pay attention.