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.”