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.
is a distinctive poetic debut that challenges ableist perceptions of normalcy, and centres “the double architecture / of ( metamorphosis (.”