Reviewed by Liv Mammone
While I was in the midst of reading Tea Gerbeza’s book, I attended a talk by disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on the topic of Crip failure. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s framework showed that “failure” by disabled people to render projects in the precise manner in which they might have been originally conceived, due to ableist constraints, can lead to those projects becoming sites of wild dreaming, improvised innovation, and chaotic creativity. It’s only in failing by normative metrics that disabled people can envision new understandings with which to enrich their lives and their communities.
I think I will fail in my objective to fully express my respect and admiration for Gerbeza’s new long poem, How I Bend Into More. I thought I’d fail to write this review until four days before it was due because the limitations of my disability challenged me to recreate, in a purely digital, prose medium, the beauty, innovation, and razor sharp focus of how she renders her own. She wields the cesura, the line break, and the parenthetical as the spaces between vertebrae, asking how disabled writers can render the experiences of their bodies on the page as organizing aesthetic principles rather than their subject only. (I found myself thinking about this book in relation to Rob Mascia Colgate’s recent collection, Hardly Creatures, where they use their experience as a curator to structure the book as their ideally accessible art exhibit.) Even subtitling the book as “a long poem,” even while using titles for each poem individually, points the reader to an elongated, stretched reading experience to mirror the author’s physical reality of scoliosis and spinal surgery.
The poems (or poem) are augmented by photographs of Gerbeza’s body and the brace she used, excerpts of the poems on folded and scanned paper in various shapes, and configurations made of smaller curves that the poet has carved out of cardboard and paper. The result is a multi-medium art object. We become witness to all the ways one person is attempting to see themselves and the trauma their body has undergone. Indeed, the speaker emerges from the near-death experience unable to see its effects on her body, detailed in “2 Weeks After Surgery.” (100) This poem, like many, is bisected down the middle of its page by a dashed line that recalls both a straight spine and a suture. It also draws attention to the way that a surgery, like any traumatic event, bifurcates one’s life into the time before and the time after in any number of ways. I can’t recreate the typography here—my failure.
I can’t ever see my wound relying on mirror settings shadow highlight colour imbalance nothing is my back
So this collection is a physical object created to rectify a bodily failure, like the back brace or the scalpel. As a medical text admonishes the poem’s speaker, “The right/patient will avoid/surgery, this is the body’s goal. This is my body’s ‘failure.’” This was a jarring difference from my own medicalized childhood, in which surgery was considered the goal, and to resist it was to resist proximity to the nondisabled body.
Failure functions as a major theme in Gerbeza’s book-length poem. There is the failure of the speaker’s body and the failure of the methods imposed to contain it. There’s the failure of the speaker’s adolescent friends and lovers to understand the magnitude of what’s happening/happened/going to happen to her. The volta of a particular poem culminates in a classmate assuring “surgery is going to make you/sexy” even as a best friend stays up all night with the speaker armed with music, hair dye, and Monster in a teenage pre-vigil. I found myself struck the hardest by the failures felt and enacted by the speaker’s parents, for whom she must function as translator as well as patient and subject. (20)
four years after
escape from Yugosavian
Civil War four years after
confrontations
with death.
My parents believe
My surgery worse
……. ..
than war
I felt so plugged into the cycle Gerbeza attempts to detail. Our parents were the ones who relinquished our bodies to the doctors, but they then also became the keepers of the stories of what happened to us. If the child is of a certain age, then the histo-mythology and biography of the child’s experience become filtered through the trauma of the parents’ fear and helplessness. So who owns the story? Who owns the pain? Are we the cause of our parents’ trauma and how do we carry that in our bodies and in addition to carrying our bodies?The child speaker in these poems also needs to explain to her parents what was going to be done to her body. The courage in that need is the cornerstone of this book: the use of language to approximate experience. But Gerbeza takes it one step further and uses the physical object of the book, with its white space, to illustrate where language fails.
In the capitalist West, death might be seen as the ultimate failure. I believe this is ableism’s root. The midsection of the book, where the speaker codes during this surgery that’s been so invested with life’s every question and promise, a child stands at this precipice. Gerbeza’s genius for structure combines perfectly with her stinging gift for imagery to create a reading experience that was nothing short of terrifying and transcendent. Each individual image is suspended, as her future was, on a new page above or below an unbroken flat line in the vastness of whiteness. Gerbeza writes, “excess refuses solution/when translation traces a flatline/i dream a yellow dress/lace.” (81-85) It’s a rare treasure of a reading experience to encounter a book of poetry with its own volta. Though my own history of surgical intervention has no near death experience that I’m aware of, I still felt, in my body, the same fear of decades ago from every time I was placed under anesthesia. I often feel the same anxiety when faced with a blank, white page. Perhaps the space has always reminded me of that.
Gerbeza is fearless, holding the sword and shield of reflection and poetic craft. Her speaker returns into infinite curiosity and expansion. Earlier in the book, she writes, “how do I grasp/what my body has/to teach me?” (13) and later, “will my body turn itself inside out / to show me its answer?” (16) These are questions of astounding tenderness to address toward a body that is fighting you. If, with this first effort, Gerbeza has offered a work of such groundbreaking skill and abundant love, I can only be breathless with excitement about what she’ll continue to create with further time and insight.
Title: How I Bend Into More: A Long Poem
Author: Tea Gerbeza
Publisher: Palimpsest Press
Year: 2025
Read a review of Liv Mammone’s book, Fire in the Waiting Room, in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Liv Mammone (she/her) is an editor and poet from Long Island. Her poetry has appeared with Button Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, The Medical Journal of Australia, and in many places. In 2017, she competed for Union Square Slam and was a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, she is currently an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s poetry database, The Quarry. Her first collection, Fire in the Waiting Room is available from Game Over Books.