Jessica Bebenek, No One Knows Us There: Poems

 

Cosmos

O Neil deGrasse Tyson, I needyou
more than words can say. Totell me again
of our slow seep throughgenerations,
our transientcompanionship. Fill me again
with beer and then weedand then food
and then a little moreweed. You know
what I need. Superior knowledgeslams
against me and crack I amless than
a second, less than quantifiableworth,
caloric nourishment,fidelity.
                                             There are so
many things, NeildeGrasse Tyson, rushing
away from us atexponentially increasing speeds
and only one thingrushing toward us.
The more I listen, themore I imagine
I could understand you. Neil,I have so many ideas.
What’s your mailingaddress?

Thefull-length poetry debut by Montreal-based poet Jessica Bebenek, following eightchapbooks, 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 “presentstwo distinct and moving portraits of womanhood. The first is that of the devoted,caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realitiesof palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older,compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenekrewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuinehealing.” And there is such grief, such loss, here. As the opening poem, “Hospice,”ends:

I lied. There was afourth walk, but it confused itself
with heartbeat, the braininstructing the lungs to pump
within a vacuum. The feetfinding sheets of stone beneath
themselves and these stonesleading
around the side of thehouse, through several doors,
an accommodating hallway,
back into the room of thepoem’s origin.
It was a room containingall the bodies I knew
in varying states ofdecomposition.

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

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