No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek

From wherever I am, I will
send word like a golden thread,
rolling an unravelling ball through time
towards myself.

In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early 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, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.

At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us There takes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar.

Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change.

Praise for No One Knows Us There

“Death and its horror, whether we ignore it or not, await us all. Jessica Bebenek’s brilliant poems are a burning light just ahead of us, and we follow each page with a new sense of breathing. I love this book; it gave me a beautiful living frame for the great vanishing trick of life, and I want to buy a copy for everyone I love!” —CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

“In No One Knows Us There Jessica Bebenek lays bare death processes, grief, and resilience with a documentarian’s eye. Her lyrics sing not only of ‘the mundanity of being left behind’ but also desire, and the beauty there is to be found in entropy. She writes ‘if bent rings and broken chains can/transmute de-form…so I can/draw experience into my fractures.’ A truly compelling debut.” —Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

“In these poems, tending to loss and to life is kaleidoscopic—sorrow and gratitude brightly shine, blur together, transform into other emotions, other perspectives. Attentiveness, here, is enthralling and deeply felt. The language is deftly calibrated to the life-changing and to the life-giving. Startling imagery (‘feet swelled beyond shoes’) and hard-won insight (‘We accept love / now knowing / it will leave us.’) rattle and soothe. Jessica Bebenek is a dazzlingly gifted poet who has written a book that echoes and lingers.” —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Press Coverage

“Lament” by Jessica Bebenek: The Montreal writer is on the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist —CBC Books

Interview with Jessica Bebenek, longlisted for CBC Poetry Prize for “Lament” —CBC Radio’s Let’s Go with Sabrina Marandola