Suture lines permeate powerful long poem

In her arresting debut, How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 135 pages, $22), Tea Gerbeza uses visual and lyric techniques in a long poem that, while it centres her experience with scoliosis and spinal surgery, includes her parents’ experiences during the Bosnian war and a celebration of coming of age, friendship and pleasure.

From the earliest pages, Gerbeza teaches the reader how to read the innovations in her poems. For example, in … … … …. . Pain she scores the page with ellipses, which she describes as “small punctures// …… ….. ……. ……….. .… … . // [… .]//……………….. … alter my body’s syntax.” These periods and ellipses interrupt the text and act as markers of pain throughout.

In much of the book, Gerbeza bifurcates the page vertically with suture lines. In most instances these mark a clean break within the line; however, when the words cross these sutures, Gerbeza reveals the enmeshment of pain, trauma and self: “If I have the answer to the question | it’s either Scoliosis or it’s temporary/ If it’s temporary either Scoliosis doesn’t exist or I don’t exist// | If I don’t exist Scoliosis doesn’t either.”

The way Gerbeza addresses this enmeshment between pain and subjectivity is one of the many stand-out aspects of this collection, for the formal innovation and emotional expansiveness she brings to bear. One of the central motifs that progresses through How I Bend Into More is the gradual crafting of a quilled paper spine, which is ultimately pictured against Gerbeza’s back and unifies “five year old self braced eighty degree self surgery self forty-five degree postop self// every self” that has been fragment.

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Rebecca Salazar refuses to pull her rhetorical punches in her powerful second book, antibody (McClelland & Stewart, 160 pages, $23): “my warlock// gaslights me for breakfast. poisons me,/ then vomits in my lap and plays at victim./ my pain is really his is all my fault is just/ a curse he has to bear.”

Bringing together body horror and supernatural beings, true crime and law, Salazar resists, at the intersection of gendered and racialized violence, silencing the speaker’s experience of trauma for others’ convenience.

In Duende, a poem early in the collection, Salazar writes of pregnancy loss in the aftermath of sexual violence, using the duende, a figure — here, a spirit — out of Iberian and Latin American folk traditions to symbolize this loss: “when i begin to lose my knives and memories/ abuelo tells me i have come of age and woken it.// most spirits in our family make unrelenting thieves.” This opening connects the speaker’s experience to their family’s history of surviving gendered and colonial violence.

Throughout the poem, the speaker’s duende steals domestic objects, which the speaker connects to essential parts of themselves. While the speaker concludes that “my duende steels my memory/ of the child’s face, spares me remembering/ if i know her parentage, spares me remembering if underneath/ that blizzard shroud men made me//hers,” this is hardly an easy conclusion. The speaker may be spared in a contingent way, but the poems that follow are haunted not by spirits but a systemic compounding of trauma.

Woven through the collection are a series of SLAPP (that is, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) poems, which lay bare the way institutional strictures systematically compound trauma. In these poems, the censorship Salazar resists is explicitly included. “xxxxx scold’s bridle xxxxxxxxxxxxx/ too little/ too legal/ too tight,” they write in SLAPP/ article iii. With the reference to the scold’s bridle, Salazar ties the legal procedure and its particular silencing both as punishment and public humiliation.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.