Jessica Bebenek, No One Knows Us There: Poems

 

Cosmos

O Neil deGrasse Tyson, I need you
more than words can say. To tell me again
of our slow seep through generations,
our transient companionship. Fill me again
with beer and then weed and then food
and then a little more weed. You know
what I need. Superior knowledge slams
against me and crack I am less than
a second, less than quantifiable worth,
caloric nourishment, fidelity.
                                             There are so
many things, Neil deGrasse Tyson, rushing
away from us at exponentially increasing speeds
and only one thing rushing toward us.
The more I listen, the more I imagine
I could understand you. Neil, I have so many ideas.
What’s your mailing address?

The full-length poetry debut by Montreal-based poet Jessica Bebenek, following eight chapbooks, as well as landing on the shortlist the Writers’ Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, is No One Knows Us There: Poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2025), a collection self-described as one that “presents two distinct and moving portraits of womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.” And there is such grief, such loss, here. As the opening poem, “Hospice,” ends:

I lied. There was a fourth walk, but it confused itself
with heartbeat, the brain instructing the lungs to pump
within a vacuum. The feet finding sheets of stone beneath
themselves and these stones leading
around the side of the house, through several doors,
an accommodating hallway,
back into the room of the poem’s origin.
It was a room containing all the bodies I knew
in varying states of decomposition.

Built out of two sections of narrative, first-person lyrics, the structure of No One Knows Us There is set in halves, in counterpoint, comparable to the dual-structure Montreal-based poet T. Liem utilized in their SLOWS : TWICE (Coach House Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Whereas Liem’s is a collection of mirror-texts, with each poem corresponding to another at the other end, until each of the two sides finally meet in the middle, Bebenek utilizes the two sides of her No One Knows Us There as a paired set of moments, allowing the two perspectives to glimpse each other in and through specific experiences. The immediacy of the narrator’s experience is provided counterpoint against distance, and the wisdom that emerges through time. “Here is the moment,” she writes, as part of “The Future,” near the end of the first section, “when you leave / without leaving            You don’t say a thing / You don’t flick             two fingers at my brim / Here we are           You are not saying / Well.” One might see this poem meeting the piece “The End,” set at the end of the second section, of the collection, that begins: “And what will I do if / at the end of all of this/ I am not led by the hand / to understanding?”

Bebenek’s narrator works through grief as it is happening, and, again, years later, revisiting what can’t help but shift through the intervening time. Part of what will be interesting through Bebenek’s further and future work will be seeing how such a lyric will develop, given an opening salvo that already seeks to articulate loss from two temporal perspectives. This is a strong collection, one that holds to foundations even as Bebenek’s narrator works to comprehend, to clarify, all that has happened and her origins, and all where she might eventually land. Early on in the collection, there is the poem “On the Night of the Morning / My Grandfather Died,” with all the immediacy such an event might provide, as the poem ends: “But there is no fall. / We went home. / Chose one board / and then another, / one street and walked down it, / screeching with the thing / that made us.”

 

Headlight anthology 20 + 21

[   :   ]

You take the clothes that are left:

two pairs of jeans, four t-shirts,

a jumper, underwear, socks.

You fold each item, then press them

into a bag.

You go to the bathroom,

take a fresh towel and a bar of soap.

The towel is white, the soap amber.

It smells medicinal.

Toothbrush, toothpaste, razor.

It is eleven pm.

You pick up the car keys. (Lars Horn)

I’ve finally managed to secure copies of the two most recent editions of headlight anthology, an “annual, student-run graduate journal” produced by Montreal’s Concordia University, through their English Department. If you follow my reviews at all, you most likely already know that headlight is one of a small handful of annuals I follow [see my prior headlight review here], all of which emerge from schools with engaged creative writing departments, including SUNY-Buffalo’s P-QUEUE (see my review of the latest here), or Ryerson University’s White Wall Review. Given that Concordia has long had a strong Creative Writing Department, one would think that the anthology would be given more promotional heft from the institution (or even the community, really), as an advertisement for what they are attempting to accomplish.

The twentieth annual edition of headlight includes an array of poetry, fiction and artwork (including a stunning visual, “Under Moonlight,” by Katrina Piacek) by a plethora of emerging writers, including Madeleine McDonald, Melanie Power, Nicola Sibthorpe, Eileen Holowka, Matteo Clambella, Madelaine Caritas Longman and Jessica Bebenek (the only name within that I’m already familiar with), among others. There are some really interesting pieces in this issue, such as Eileen Holowka’s powerful and evocative “Excerpts from the narrative game circuits,” that includes:

everyone always says water tastes like nothing, but the taste of nothing changes between cities. in winnipeg, the water tasted like snow, in montreal, like rain. in new york, like the steam rising out of the sewers. i take all of these flavours in, try to discern what home tastes like.

            i have become a connoisseur of nothing.

The latest volume, subtitled “Interruptions,” is the twenty-first, and the foreword by Editor-in-Chief Emily Crompton and Managing Editor Penelope Kerr is fascinating for its response to a growing series of stories over at Concordia University of multiple examples of sexual misconduct and a general toxic environment throughout the department. Citing allegations and stories told by Mike Spry, Emma Healey, Heather O’Neill and Stephen Henighan, they write from what might seem, to some, the centre of a storm: “To the people who have experienced these awful and quiet tragedies: we see you, and your experiences are valid.”

Headlight has celebrated, supported, and brought artists together for more than twenty years, but we feel it is especially important to acknowledge community now, in the face of crisis. We would like to reaffirm our commitment to change, especially for those of our readers and contributors who are Concordia students. It is through these disturbances that we are reminded to do better and be better for each other.

“Interruptions” includes contributions from Hugh Deasy, Michael D’Itri, Miles Forrester, Ann Kruzelecky, Chloe Levman-Dolgin, Marlene Oeffinger, Marianne Paquette, Fawn Parker, Alexei Perry Cox, Sabina Reeves and Olivia Wood. Highlights to this volume include the exhaltations of Michael D’Itri’s “STOP,” and the rush of Fawn Parker’s “CRISIS STATE” (you did pick up her 2015 title from Metatron, yes?), that includes:

The closing of the skin draping over the thick boiled white the liquid retained in the membrane the shine of the wetness on the thick white plush the prevention of the sour yellow leak with the redraping of the skin the liquid information the information parts the sorting and ordering of the shifting shapes the difference between the sour yellow hitting the conglomerate  !  and the projected throatpit wolliness in the tented cavern recreate it in this one specific way

If previous editionso of headlight are any indication, there are names in these issues you will most likely see again, so I would recommend you pay attention.

grain magazine 41.1: home-myths

My artistic practice is and always has been based on the creation of fictive characters who perform distilled psychological, social and experiential narratives in painting tableaux, drawing, and painting-based installation. Central themes that have occupied my work have included issues of desire and sexuality, gender identity, intimacy, and relationships to self and other. Over the past number of years I have worked in thematic series, beginning each with a conceptual framework and then allowing an intuitive and improvisational layered painting process to determine the eventual form and content of the work. In this way, my process has the quality and sensation of being a director, writer, casting agent, costume and set designer, for a compressed film or fiction that slips and glimpses, and that occupies a single field—yet remains unfolding. (Eliza Griffiths)

It’s great to see the work of former Ottawa visual artist Eliza Griffiths featured in the new issue of Grain magazine, subtitled “home-myths” (a detail of her "Love Story/Fear Eats the Soul (after RWF)," 2013, is reproduced on the cover). Griffiths was one of the early members of The Enriched Bread Artists collective over on Gladstone Avenue, and I featured her work in an issue of Missing Jacket magazine back around 1996. There is something about her work that has always been quite striking; able to paint variations of similar faces, and yet, each managing their own personalities. As always, the details are deepest in the eyes, becoming more ghost-like as the image ripples outward. The characters she paints exist almost entirely within the scope of the face, and she manages to create real people we haven’t yet met.

The issue themes around a fairly familiar trope – the idea of home, and the myth-making that can’t help but occur. “We mythologize our past,” editor Rilla Friesen writes in her “Editor’s Note.” It harks back to a line from John Newlove, in which he reminded us that the past is, indeed, a foreign country. As Friesen writes: “The works in ‘Home-Myths’ each have a different balance of geography/love. If there is no fixed home place, the need for love is increased.” I’m uncertain I agree with her thesis—she should read the piece Yann Martel wrote, “Philadelphia Green Blue – Musings on the Meaning of Home,” from the anthology Writing Home: A PEN Canada Anthology, ed. Constance Rooke (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1997). Home is simply an idea, and to have no specific sense of home does not necessarily make one groundless. Still, there are some impressive pieces in this issue, from the short, descriptive lyric of Anita Dolman, the myth-lyric of Jessica Bebenek, and the two historical/myth lyrics by Catherine J. Stewart. There are pieces here on Snow White, Daphne and Apollo, weddings, Lamborghinis, Mahler, Freud and Nazis, millennials, and various incarnations of what could be called home.

Galena

Claim staked in 1883—

Jubilee Mountain marked,

measured, owned.

____

Over 70 years, Galena ore—

silver, lead, zinc—clawed out

of the mountain, ballast

shipped out of the valley.

____

Barite, white dust dredged

from the tailings ponds, rose

from the ore trucks and settled

into the clothes hanging on the line. We

wore it to school, basketball games.

We danced in it.

____

The ducks we plucked

on the hillside, breasts filled

with shot made from Galena ore,

lead finding its way home (Catherine J. Stewart)

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair, (part one,

[Jeannie Hoag and Brian Mihok, Sunnyoutside] The nineteenth anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair has come andgone, and a couple of reports have already been posted, including those by Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie and Jessica Bebenek. Might we see you at the spring event? Give me another month or three, and I’ll most likely book it for May (possibly, depending on venue availability). There are a few other book fairs coming up, including Expozine in Montreal, Toronto's Meet the Presses, and another in Toronto (keep an eye on the small press book fair blog for information).

Buffalo NY: From Buffalo, came the Sunnyoutside table, hosted by two of their editors – Brian Mihok and Jeannie Hoag. Hoag had a small chapbook that she read from at the pre-fair event, her New Age of Ferociousness (Agnes Fox Press, 2010). 

New York

There is much left to do.

People from New York

have increased chances of success.

I am not from New York.

I would consider this day

abnormally cold. How cold

it is today. How difficult

it is to leave home and

succeed.

The poems here are quirky, surreal, oddly funny and even confusing at times, and have the most wonderful titles, from “Touchless Car Wash” and “For So Long There Has Been a Monster” to “The Last Travel Plaza in Ohio” and “I Never Loved You, Connecticut.” Using straightforward lines, Hoag manages a series of accumulative twists and turns that are impossible to anticipate, and absolutely delightful to watch unfold. There are moments reminiscent of another Agnes Fox author, Hailey Higdon, for her own straightforward lines working quirky surrealism, and I could easily see Canadian poets such as Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin immediately connecting with some of these pieces. Given that this chapbook is a couple of years old, as is the collaborative work she did with Kyle McCord, Informal Invitation To A Traveler: Letters Between J.R. and Miss Kim (Gold Wake Press, 2011), I am very hoping that Hoag is working on something new.

Natalie Portman Is Smarter Than I

She has a mole on her left cheek

I have a mole on my left cheek

They are called beauty marks

and we both have them

She is in movies. I saw

Mel Gibson getting into a car

across from the Post Office

She doesn’t love my cat

the way I love my cat and

she doesn’t know my middle name

I don’t know hers but I could easily find it

Natalie Portman speaks five languages

That’s not me

I don’t know how she feels about Starbucks

but when I’m out of town

sometimes I patronize Starbucks.

Toronto ON: When Toronto writer Jessica Bebenek was here, she read from the pseudononymous duo she collaborated on with her partner, the writer Mark Jordan Manner. On Manner’s part was the prose-work “Novella: A Short Story by Kaz Adam Mason,” and Bebenek’s, the poetry chapbook “Until The Morning, by Novella Ebony Danger,” both self-published in 2013 under the “No One Gives A Fuck About Publishing” banner. The structure comes from the author of the poetry chapbook a character in the work of fiction. Paired together, the two halves of the fiction work quite well, and one of the best parts of the reading had to come from a haiku composed on their cat, from “Augustus Haikus”:

Bombs

dissonant meow

signaling your sphincter’s quake

bombs drop in the sand