In Jeda Pearl’s debut poetry collection, Time Cleaves Itself, a disabled Scottish woman of colour invites you into the split and rewoven threads of her intersecting, in between worlds as she navigates belonging and claiming space.
Landscapes and bodyscapes are brought into focus through lenses of race, illness, disability and womanhood. Ancestral languages of Scots, Patois, Geordie and English critique ableism, colonialism and Scottish exceptionalism; they ask ‘Who gets the trees?’, honour Caribbean and Scottish heritages and move from the bed as universe to fantastical and science-fictional imaginings.
Here, lyrical acts of observation unfold with defiance, tenderness, rhythm and the occasional side-eye. The accordion of time stretches across poems that deliver a sonic meditation on memory, grief, disability, belonging, empathy and resilience.