HOW I BEND INTO MORE, Tea Gerbeza

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-87-0
$21.95 CDN / $21.95 US | Trade Paperback
February 2025

Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More re-articulates selfhood in the face of ableism and trauma. Meditating on pain, consent, and disability, this long poem builds a body both visually and linguistically, creating a multimodal space that forges Gerbeza’s grammar of embodiment as an act of reclamation. Paper-quilled shapes represent the poet’s body on the page; these shapes weave between lines of verse and with them the reclaimed disabled body is made. How I Bend Into More is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centers “the double architecture / of  ( metamorphosis (.”

Praise for How I Bend Into More

How I Bend Into More is a singular, stunning debut. The brilliance and courage with which Tea Gerbeza remembers, witnesses, experiences, and imagines is matched only by the intensity with which she bends the boundaries of art. Gerbeza expands the possibilities of poetry, renewing the creative potential of everything from punctuation, lines, and images to layout, paper, and the corporeal body itself. Read this book immediately and share in this expansion, this renewal.—Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of The End Is in the Middle: Mad Fold-In Poems

How I Bend Into More is a healing line. Tea Gerbeza’s sculptural pages crack the brackets of shame and unfurl the self—the vertebral I—until poem and body touch. This is the quilled work of a heart. A bouquet of paper roses unfolding in the hand.—Jennifer Still, author of Legs, Comma, and Girlwood