SESSION 6: With no Exit Wounds and other poems
Fellow: Benj Gabun Sumabat (Poetry, English)
Moderator: Ramon Guillermo

Ramon Guillermo opened the session with praise for Sumabat’s With No Exit Wounds and Other Poems: while it derives from a deeply personal, confessional mode, they are able to address structural issues such as disability and care through the poeticization of the everyday. He also pointed out how, despite their de-subjectivation of the poetic persona, still present in their work are strategic openings for hope and possibility. On their own poetics and disability politics, Sumabat explained that they wished to reclaim the capitalist conception of care as primarily consumerist and isolating one’s self from broader communities; instead, they insisted: “the foundation of the revolution is love and care.”

Fellows and panelists lauded Sumabat’s rendering of disability as very corporeal and embodied–a deliberate effacing of trauma, so that readers may ground their own experiences in another’s. While the collection was also observed as critiquing the perfunctory, commercialized motions of disability care, several advised a more redemptive, prescriptive approach to this crisis. Suggestions included traversing from the individual to the collective, perhaps through diversifying the voices, bodies, and perspectives in the collection. Another concern raised was how Sumabat’s overly controlled, calibrated poetic voice fails to capture perfectly the tensioned, chaotic realities of trauma.

To end the session, Sumabat communicated their hopes of branching out from the introspective, recursive loops in their poetry through continuous exploration and problematization.