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 (.”
How I Bend Into More is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers.
PRAISE FOR HOW I BEND INTO MORE
Weaving through the intersections of disability, generational trauma, migration, and queerness, Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More articulates a vision of reclaiming the changing self with extraordinary grace. Gerbeza not only reshapes paper, images, and language to offer us a bracingly honest account of living with scoliosis, but succeeds in bending our perception of the disabled body against a landscape of ableism and shame. With precision and care, each page of this long poem deftly builds on the next to transform words into art. What shines brightest about this debut is the way Gerbeza shows us the expansive possibilities of love and power found in family, community, and the self. This book is a profound work of art and heart.
—2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Jury (Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Darrin Hagen, and Janika Oza)
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