Split in two parts, Jessica Bebenek’s debut poetry collection, No One Knows Us There, reflects on the grief of end-of-life care over the course of a decade. Heavy with the immediacy of loss, part one contains poems written by a younger Bebenek during the last few months of her grandfather’s life. Part two is gentler in tone as Bebenek rewrites poems from the book’s first half.
Bebenek’s choice of structure for the book makes for an honest and open portrayal of how we grow and evolve through grief. Poems from the first half will be familiar to long-time readers of Bebenek’s work; the collection’s opening poem, “Hospice,” is immediately recognizable from Bebenek’s chapbook, Fourth Walk, published in 2017 by Desert Pets Press. In untethered language, the speaker “looked at the sky, / considered the feeling of floating over the edge of existence.” A poem of the same name opens the second section of the book. In contrast to the first, the speaker is grounded, having “tied myself to life by the leash of mundanity.” While the language of floating appears in the second “Hospice,” this time it is accompanied by a more mature voice, one that has processed grief, and is “so grateful / for having floated into you / before your dispersal.”
The relationship between poems and death preoccupies the speaker through both halves of the book. In the first half, “Deer” opens with the lines: “I wanted to write a poem about a deer / but by the time I got around to it, / it was probably already dead.” In “Mountain Theorem” in the second half, Bebenek writes: “How like a poet to stare at one thing / their whole life and for it to be of absolutely / no consequence to the world. How like the elk / to eat, to continue to live.” From the speaker’s assumption of death in “Deer” to her declaration to keep on living in “Mountain Theorem,” Bebenek’s practice of rewriting allows us to see how a person’s worldview can change.
This notion of changing outlook is demonstrated through three short poems, each with the title “Trust,” that weave through the collection. In the first of the three poems, Bebenek “send[s] word like a golden thread, / roll[ing] an unravelling ball through time / toward myself.” Bebenek’s future-self catches the words, reshaping them into a new start “in the morning of my life.”
Time is fluid and non-linear, as Bebenek constructs a space where “[t]he eyes of the future are looking back to us / and they are praying” in “The Place You Leave and the Place You Return To.” The griefs of the past never leave. What the future-self can offer as a way of grappling with that grief is to look back at one’s younger self with compassion and grace, to recognize the shame, imperfections, and ragged edges. After spending time with the immediacy of loss in the first half of No One Knows Us There, there is a joy at experiencing the love, care, and growth Bebenek emphasizes in the second half.
Bios
Manahil Bandukwala
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award.