Excerpt from How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza. Published by Palimpsest Press. Copyright Tea Gerbeza, 2024. Reprinted with permission.
Based on Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2024) 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 (.”
Tea Gerbeza is the author of How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers. She is a neuroqueer, disabled poet, writer, editor, and multimedia artist creating in oskana kâ-asastêki in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK) and on the Homeland of the Métis. She primarily works with paper in her visual art, but also creates digital works on her scanner (scanography). Her writing and artwork focus on themes of reclaiming disabled identity, disability justice, the Bosnian-Croatian diaspora, queer platonic friendships, and the complexities of pain. Her artwork has been exhibited at The Art Gallery of Regina. Tea has a very loud laugh, and is one of four Pain Poets.
Most recently, Tea was a finalist for YWCA Regina’s 2026 Women of Distinction awards in the Igniting Equity category. In 2023, She was recognized by SK Arts as one of 75 strong emerging artists that makes the future of Saskatchewan arts exciting. Tea’s poem “Body of the Day” was a People’s Choice Award finalist in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2024 2-Day Poem Contest. In 2022, Tea won the Ex-Puritan’s Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. Her scanograph, “My Father Catches Me Confronting Memory,” won an Honourable Mention in Room magazine’s 2020 Cover Art Contest, and she was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize.
Tea holds a BA (Hons.) in English (2017) and an MA in Creative Writing and English from the University of Regina (2019). Tea’s thesis work for her MA was SSHRC funded. She also holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan (2021).
Photo of Tea by Ali Lauren.