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 parentsbelieve
                    mysurgery worse
. . . . . .                              . .

                        than war

FromRegina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza comes the full-length debut How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection that curvesinto multiple articulations around childhood scoliosis, reminiscent of similarwork I’ve seen by Gatineau, Quebec filmmaker and poet Jennifer Mulligan, a poemor two from her chapbook …like nailing jello to a tree… (above/groundpress, 2007). Through Gerbeza, much as Mulligan’s poems, a staggered line runsdown the centre of pages, of poems, composing a line of bent spine with text oneither side, offering visual approximations of “parentheses,” as Gerbeza’s poem“glossary of parentheses” visualizes, “around my spine [.]” Constructed asintimate notes on childhood illness, family response, suffering, privacy anddisability 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 readingpamphlets / 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 oftext and image, leaning into the text-laden photographed object so prevalent inthe 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 exploreterritory I’ve long kept private / in crescents curled with no open centres[.]”

Whatis interesting about Gerbeza’s line, the visual of which runs through thecollection as an approximation, a textual stand-in for her own spine, is how itholds as foundation through the collection, both through subject matter andtext: everything within the collection is set in relation to that singleelement. As the poem “Clearing Up the Question about ‘My Suffering’” begins: “Ifsuffering is private │ then why should I explain? / if I explain, do I startfrom my head │ to my toes [.]” She offers notes on the spine, so that she mightwrite through it, into it.