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.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Farah Ghafoor

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut poetry collection won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in art exhibitions, magazines, and anthologies such as FACE/WASTE, The Walrus, and Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019), as well as post-secondary course syllabi. Raised in New Brunswick and southern Ontario, Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Writing this book helped me channel my climate anxiety and doomism into work that can communicate with and educate others. I learned that I needed to process the climate crisis in terms of the tangible, and that eventually led me to dig into concepts of economics and colonialism. Anxiety comes from uncertainty, but there is still so much certainty when it comes to the structures and processes that propel the crisis. Shadow Price gave me an intellectual and emotional foundation for my recent work, which aims to bring economics and individual stories to the forefront.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poetry was attractive to me because it’s concise and conceptually precise. I came to it through a haiku in the second grade in one of those summer workbooks you would complete to get ahead in school. As I continued to write, it always seemed much easier to write about ideas than characters, and I was lucky to be rewarded for my efforts through school/class contests. When I stumbled upon spoken word on Youtube in high school, specifically Safia Elhillo’s “Alien Suite”, Maya Mayor’s “Perfect”, and “Somewhere in America” by Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen, I was amazed to see what poetry could do. I was also continuously inspired by other teens writing on the internet, such as my peers in The Adroit Mentorship Program.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
There are typically two origins for my work: freewrites and research. I freewrite frequently, and those passages often appear fairly close to the final draft. I also collect research and observations in that same large writing document, so for poems that are explicitly about a concept (such as shadow prices), I have to wait until I have a few key phrases/ideas that would help me approach the topic. This method can take years, but I don’t mind because my interests don’t and haven’t changed for years (which is how long it took me to write Shadow Price).

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems come from uncertainty – I write to understand myself, the world, and my place in it. I’ll stumble upon something in the world that I’m curious about, and write until I reach a conclusion. Since I’ve only written one book, I feel like it was a combined process – I was writing and collecting shorter pieces for years, and also wrote long poems specifically for the book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like participating in and attending readings, but find that I’m more of a visual reader than an aural one. I find it easier to spend time with a poem on the page, so I guess I’m more traditional that way. Readings don’t significantly add or take away from my creative process.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My work is concerned with how we are living at this point in time – specifically during the climate crisis – and what we value. At the end of the day, people are struggling to live in late-stage capitalism because economic priorities have taken precedence over ethical ones, and that has led us to devaluing the earth, which provides everything we need. Questions I’m always pursuing in my work include: What are we paying attention to? What has led us here? And where are we going if we continue down this path?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer is to tell the whole, exact truth, as unpopular as it may be.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had my writer friends always point out what I can’t see because I’m too close to the work, and my editor from House of Anansi, Kevin Connolly, always made me reconsider what I was previously too proud to let go of. It was essential (and a little difficult) but you have to let go of your ego to achieve your goals in any field.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Jess Rizkallah tweeted out probably 8 years ago: Figure out what you want to say and write it down. I’ve found that this helps bring a poem back to its emotional, truthful centre when it gets lost during revision.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Non-fiction is hard because you can’t hide, even a little. I suppose that’s why I write it so infrequently – I’d say I’m a relatively private person.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I tend to write at night, when my mind’s tired enough to be imaginative. It’s important for me to make a cup of tea that I will forget about and reheat at irregular intervals. When I’m revising or have a goal for the session, I first read work in the tone/style that I’m trying to achieve (lyrical, authoritative, etc.), then get to work. Revision usually takes many nights of rewriting.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’ve more or less given up on trying to write during creative blocks – the best poems that come about during those times are about writer’s block itself. I’m trying to accept my creative cycle – months of block, idea germination, revision – so I'm trying to lean in during each period. I’m always jotting down observations and research though, anything that I read and find interesting.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
This is where I admit my bad sense of smell. I’m going to be cliche but honest here and say my mother’s cooking.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’m heavily inspired by nature, science, economics, architecture – processes that we can see and touch and affect our everyday lives. So you’ll see me write more about labour than space, for example. Visual art interests me most when it’s as precise as a poem.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Currently, Solmaz Sharif, Aria Aber, Daniel Borzutzky, Natalie Diaz, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Mai Der Vang. While I was writing the book: Jenny Odell, Andri Snaer Magnason, Craig Santos Perez, as well as all of the other authors I note in the acknowledgments of Shadow Price.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to write a novel, a song, a short story, and a screenplay. And make a short film and curate an art exhibition and decorate a really beautiful cake. I'd like to try everything.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would try to be a forest ranger or an ornithologist, though I’m pretty sure an outdoorsy job wouldn’t suit me. I’d love to experience nature every day – it makes me feel so alive.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is my main tool of reflection and intellectual exploration. It’s a compulsion, like breathing. I feel strange when I haven’t written in a while, full of pent-up energy.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Young Woman Book Job by Emma Healey and Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My second poetry collection, which will have the same themes but hopefully focus on economics.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nuala O’Connor, Menagerie

 

A Grey Gardens for Galway

Fleece-thick dust on the windowsills. A cobweb, big as a sail, wafts in the breath of my passing. Ivy lattices the windowpanes and one long, ambitious tendril has found its way in and slinks along the wall. I stand and look and breathe. This is the house I want to die in. I kneel down to rub ten, twenty years of grime from the floor tiles. They are mustard and terracotta with cuts of blue; they speak of maids-of-all-work and susurrating hemlines. My heart bulges into my mouth in a push of goy, a bittersweet, home-found palpation, though I’ve never been in this house before. The ceiling and walls reach to me, they bend close and caress my hair, they pour their mildewed breath along my neck. Welcome, they say. You are welcome.

Galway, Ireland poet and fiction writer Nuala O’Connor’s latest poetry collection, her fifth, is Menagerie (Dublin Ireland; Arlen House, 2025), a curious assemblage of prose poem narratives and short scenes that hold a thickness of detail and a lush sense of the lyric. “Now that the cage is open,” the title poem begins, “the wild animals are gone; now that the wild animals are gone, the garden is silent; now that the garden is silent, the trees take up their whisper [.]” Across a suite of seventy-eight poems, O’Connor offers a prose menagerie of uncertainties, searching; she offers attempts at clarity, seeking; of stories and storytelling, floating across fable and fairytale and a science of hard facts, all told in a lyric lilt. “The geraniums are scarlet pansies,” the single-sentence of “Matisse in Massachusetts” begins, “their leaves, succulent shamrocks, the wallpaper, a sky lassoed by pink ribbons, the table is a saffron desert, the plate, holding the pot, somewhy sheds blue ceramic petals, the signature is an exuberant upcurve, each S a joyless snake, sizzing high to snare the viewer, as adroitly  as innocent Eve, sizing up the seductive beauty of an apple.” There is such song in her descriptions, one that understands myth and beauty, the wealth of the garden and a detailed description. Her narratives might be composed in straight lines but they are nothing of the kind, offering a kind of detailed and direct meandering into and through struggle, complexity and ease. These poems are quite magical, honestly.

 

Mahaila Smith, Seed Beetle: poems

 

Thesis

It was something the discourse got stuck on:
Where the eels came from.
No one had ever seen them mate.
Maybe all I needed to know
Was how they changed form and why;
what question they were answering when their bodies
adapted from freshwater to salt.
How did the passage of time move in a fluid cycle?
How could they continue to make their pilgrimage
through so many man-made barriers?

The full-length poetry debut by Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith, following two chapbooks, including one through above/ground press, is Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025), a speculative collection set as an assembled manuscript composed well into an imagined future. “I found the following material in notebooks and desk drawers,” the “Foreword” begins, “in blog posts and hard drives during the process of creating the Nebula Armis fonds in the years following her passing. An archive of her poems is now housed in the Chamberlin Collection of Poetry of the Toronto Public Library.” The “Foreword,” by the way, by the fictional “Dip Seshadri,” is dated “New Haywood, 2102.” The most overt comparison to this collection would be the full-debut by Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], a collection of poems by robot poets put together some two hundred years in the future, or even the way the late Robert Kroetsch wrote the fictional archivist Raymond assembling the work of a lost poet and her work, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) [see my piece on such here]. As, too, B-e, the framing by Seshadri’s preface provides an environmental concern:

            Nebula poured her energy into advocating for the lives of aquatic species. She was a primary organizer of the rally against Veil’s mining expedition to Mars, after it was discovered there was life in the planet’s polar caps. For her role in interrupting this project she was incarcerated for 6 months. All poetry she created during this time was destroyed.
            After her release, we moved to her hometown, New Haywood, Ontario, where we worked with her mothers and the community to take back the land from Utopic Robotics, dedicating our efforts to creating community gardens and supporting the young people and children above all else. Ensuring that they could grow food and provide for their futures. We worked to make sure that the land was accessible to everyone. We met with the Tyendinaga Elders Council, bringing the hard-shelled automated agricultural beetles with us, and their individual stores of seeds to decide what  should become of them. We pooled our seed libraries, made planting calendars, and learned how the plants depended on each other to survive.

As both B-e and Kroetsch did, so too, Smith’s fictional editor, Dip Seshadri, helps frame this collection, providing a further step of distance between the Smith and the poems, offering an opening insight of the late author through the lens of not only as her editor, but as her partner (comparable to Kroetsch’s Raymond, although the archivist fell in love with Rita through her words). As the preface ends: “Nebula was the love of my life. I miss her with all my heart.”

Set in three sections, Nebula’s poems write of repeated layers of death and rebirth, technological advance and environmental crises, utopia and its failures. The narrative framework of this imagined future is curious, interesting; and I’m intrigued at why, specifically, Smith wrote out this future through the lyric as opposed to prose; wondering, perhaps, if there might be a novelization at some point from an alternate perspective around the same narrative this collection offers. Held together, the poems each provide narrative moments of lyrically-straightforward narrative sketches that together accumulate into a larger and broader concern with how technology interferes with repair, and has the potential to interfere with utopia itself. Nebula’s poems offer depictions of days and networks, beetles and histories, and fingers through dirt; as a warning, a look at and through where we might land from the perspective of having been through it.

A Young Automated Beetle
Writing Home

My mummy had soft hands and strong bones.
She was the one who put my solar-powered energy-cell
in my core. The one who whispered
my purpose to me as she brought me and my siblings
to our little runway.

Be generous with your seeds and your water, please.

I am happy when I work because I think of her.
Sometimes I send her little messages just to tell her where I am.
I don’t hear back, but I keep letting her know that I’m ok.
I look at the sky and the dry dirt and my little scooped feet;
She would probably like to see these heavy hills,
of limestone; iron; and quartz;
fragments of mammalian skeletons and disconnected roots
I think about how I want to renew this place
and make it special for her.