With reviews of books by Tea Gerbeza, Drew Lavigne, and Ruby Singh
How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza (Palimpsest Press, 2025)
I lived under a rock in the era of Tumblr, LiveJournal and PostSecret. So, I was late to the party discovering the electric joy and excitement these things had in their prime. Each, in their own way, found a way to normalize bringing what’s hidden and not talked about into the open. Tea Gerbeza’s debut collection washed me in this same feeling. It brings the things we don’t talk about to the center and normalizes the conversation around “Pain / persistent as a period / a stopped sentence.”
How I Bend Into More might not have anything to do with Tumblr and PostSecret, but it manages to capture the heart of what they illicit. From the aesthetic to the intent, Gerbeza crafts the personal into art and builds a bridge that makes it accessible. There’s no barrier between poet and reader, past and present, family, disability and honesty, war and surgery, life, death and hope.
How I Bend Into More is a book of time. It documents as it travels. “I explore territory I’ve long kept private / in crescents curled with no open centers.” The collection, a long poem, is a visual feast that explores the speaker’s journey with dis/ability and pain through scoliosis. Gerbeza builds the poem around the spine, using various techniques that combine art and poetry to create a compelling hybrid long poem. The body, pain, family, love, lust, sex, friendship, connection, time and identity are all woven in and around the spine and its curve.
Art, visuals and identity are integral to the book’s core. As I read, I noticed paper quilling isn’t just art for the speaker, it’s connection, identity, possibility. Paper quilling feels like it’s part of the speaker’s body “needle tool smooths inner walls a tunnel to what is coiled beneath / possibilities / for cocooning are endless endless cocoons loop / fragments of petals grow out of toothed metal.”
How I Bend Into More feels like it holds possibilities. In the sense of narrative, of poetry and art—the joy art brings when a poet reimagines what’s “possible,” in the sense of time and memory and how “repair begins / with what my body remembers / my past belief a mirror a field guide to the self.”
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Tea Gerbeza is a queer, disabled writer and multimedia artist. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in English & Creative Writing from the University of Regina. Tea won the Ex-Puritan‘s 2022Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. Her work has been published internationally in various magazines and journals. How I Bend Into Moreis her first book. Find out more at teagerbeza.com
Evening Dress by Drew Lavigne (Anstruther Press, 2025)
One of the great pleasures of Instagram (and they are few and far between) is you can hear poets read their poems from the comfort of wherever you are. There’s no paywall and no need for an organizer or curator. There’s just the poet, the poem and the listener. I was fascinated when I stumbled across a few of Drew Lavigne’s readings on social media. What a treat! There’s an arresting quality when he reads, his voice commands attention. It commands you to stop scrolling and listen.
The poems in Evening Dress are similar. Dressed in sophistication and elegance, the poems in this chapbook demand attention. This isn’t a chapbook you just flip through. The lines, spacing and rhythms dictate the speed in which you read. In the opening poem “The boy,” each stanza and line is carefully crafted “in rigid cubism / objects clump in geometric / form”. The poem follows a rhythm that allows the reader to gently ebb and flow throughout the stanzas. Each opening line hangs on a word for a moment before it rolls into what follows.
As a whole, there’s a slowness and control to how Evening Dress is composed. As the book progresses momentum builds with small jolts of electricity until we get to the poem “Head” where there’s an unraveling. A looseness edging violence and whimsy: “In sleep I waited for a man to come, / wrap his hands around my neck. Neck with me. Neck to neck, strangle me.” “Head” only teases what’s to come.
I noticed something fascinating while reading Evening Dress: the emotional arc naturally builds towards its apex as Lavigne’s writing style mirrors this progression. Evening Dress begins very controlled and measured, however, as it progresses Lavigne’s writing starts to feel more frantic, primal, violent. The poem “An Ordinary Family in the Final Days” looks completely composed on paper, however, the repetition, sounds and images scream chaos. The speaker tells us “In my hands all things shatter, / there’s the glass of the broken mirror: the family curse that fills my matter.” What follows, is a more stripped down and vulnerable speaker. Just as honest, but softer as he walks “through a trail up a mountain” in agony, heartache, love and strength, eventually bringing himself towards the lilacs.
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Drew Lavigne is the Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. A member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Éditions Rhizome. He translated the collection Poems Twofold with Georgette LeBlanc and is the editor of Labyrinth Press.
Read a review of a selection of Drew Lavigne’s poetry from Ryan Blacketter on our Patreon here
Bladed Edge Between by Ruby Singh (Next Page Press, 2025)
You never know what you’re going to get when you sit down with a poet you’ve never read before. There’s a thrill to the mystery of it, some apprehension and a lot of curiosity. When I sat down with Bladed Edge Between by Ruby Singh, I tiptoed to the back of the book to his bio and then did a little bit of internet sleuthing. It’s important for me to feel connected with who I’m reading and with Singh I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to know more about the person who wrote these poems. How much of him can I find in these pages? Does he wear a mask when he writes? How does the poet connect to the poem?
Singh is an interdisciplinary artist whose work with sound and music pulses at the heart of this collection. “Hold my body together / Music tuned to the vibration / of these cells…” Soundscapes and music is a language Singh uses to connect with the body, family and ancestors. It’s the lifeblood that ties together Bladed Edge Between. Throughout the collection, there’s a series of poems titled “Sangeet: …” that serve as small interludes that ground the book in the tangible feelings and moments of the speaker’s life. They often contrast the bigger concepts explored in some of the other poems.
Many of the poems in the book read like prayers or meditations, capturing a weathered wisdom that’s both traveled and traveling through pain, grief and healing. “She took my hand and we dove into the mystery of her eyes. Both she and I knew it would be the last time we’d see each other…” Bladed Edge Between captures massive, human feelings, the cascading experience of grief, and finds meaning (and acceptance) in both pain and loss.
Singh’s collection sparks conversation between languages, ancestors, melodies and different time periods. “The past kneels for our present, the present dances for our future”. The poems feel like they’re in constant motion, reaching for transformation that comes with time, language and trying to find meaning in the world after experiencing grief “I came as song / Tongue curve to shape air into lung… / Calling myself back to the sky / on the night I was born.”
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Ruby Singh is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, and educator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, BC). His creative practice moves between poetry, music, photography, and film, weaving mythos, ecology, justice, and fantasy into vivid, boundary-crossing works.
Celebrated for his innovative voice, Singh has been honored with a Lieutenant Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in Art and Music, multiple Jessie and Leo award nominations, a Juno nomination, and WCMA awards for both Global Music Artist and Electronic/Dance Artist of the Year. His expansive projects — from the a cappella constellation Vox.Infold to the sufi hip hop of Jhalaak — echo the spirit of his book of poems Bladed Edge Between: forging portals between worlds and singing through the thresholds of transformation. Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you’re fantabulous. Insta: @michael.russell.poet
I like how you highlighted the details in each review. What stood out to you the most this time?