No One Knows Us There: Poems by Jessica Bebenek

Reviewed by Bryn Robinson

Where did you leave me? With everything to survive.

To live is to love, and to love, is to eventually grieve; this is the central thesis of a darkly beautiful debut poetry collection by Jessica Bebenek that explores the finite, yet cyclical, nature of our nature. In her lyrics, you feel her visceral pain but also her deep love.

It was a room containing all the bodies I knew
in varying states of decomposition.
This is my hand placed on the skin covering your ribs, your chest
in the dark, indigo walls, opening
this body, the night cracking...

As Bebenek explores her experiences with death (in particular, her grandfather’s), she shares her grief in words that mirror the subject matter: frank, fierce, unapologetic. (If you have had the experience of watching a loved one approach their death, it will particularly resonate.) The collection does not solely explore a singular dimension; she also examines how we are tied through time and seasons together, through her own creation story and through her experiences with romantic love. It’s simply that, for me, these were resonant because of the juxtaposition with “the night cracking”. One’s part in the grand play tends to feel different when timelines are irrevocably altered.

When I say that Bebenek captures her subject matter exquisitely, it’s because it is honest - because that is grief: A constant refrain, a tidal wave, in which love that no longer has a home but continues to look for a new place to rest while changing the shape of the person holding it. And that, too, is the cycle of life: “how the human body’s cells shed and renew” until we “make our way back to humus” and are “flipping my scaffold like a mattress”. She uses repetition and re-analysis to haunting impact, revisiting poem titles and broad topics in different ways. In some pieces, she builds tension - starting a slow pace and building urgency until the taut lines are snapped and everything is released: A crescendo of pain, a final breath. The wait for someone suffering to finally be at ease. Processing the loss of a home for a love.

One could imagine that a collection of poetry that features the living decay and demise of loved ones to be deeply depressing. Perhaps it’s a marker of having reached a particular age, where questions of mortality become a little louder, but I instead found her work to be invigorating; a clear voice through the howls of grief that can only be shared and heard by only those who are alive and who understand what it means to have loved and lost.

and I am so grateful 
for having floated into you
before you dispersed

---

About the Author

JESSICA BEBENEK is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.

About the Reviewer

Bryn Robinson (she/her) lives in New Brunswick, Canada, where she uses her PhD in experimental psychology to help her support mental health research in the province. She prefers contemporary fiction, narrative non-fiction, graphic novels and poetry that is emotional, reflective, and if it can do it with humour, all the better. Bryn shares her own work on her website, Campfire Notebook.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ book*hug press (April 8, 2025)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1-771669-39-9 (Paperback)