By Vanessa Moeller, Frye Correspondent
Work visited: Jessica Bebenek’s No One Knows Us There (Book*hug Press, 2025)
If you have never lost someone close to you, you might be able to imagine grief as finite, as having a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. But when you do lose someone, especially someone you palliatively cared for, their death becomes a fixed point in your life, one you move in an elliptical orbit around. Sometimes you pass close by it again. Other times, you are farther away and able to gain a new perspective thanks to the distance. But you never escape its pull. You just keep changing within its orbit.
It is this elliptical circling that gives Jessica Bebenek’s No One Knows Us There its shape. Divided into two sections, the collection acts as a kind of call-and-response between a young woman who has just lost her grandfather and an older version of that same woman as she moves through the later stages of grief. Both halves of the book circle the grandfather’s death, revealing that while the loss is a fixed point, grief is never resolved, just transformed.
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Part 1: Periapsis
The first half of the book places us closest to the fixed point of loss. The grandfather has just died. For the speaker, the world feels both unreal and sharp, like she has never seen it so clearly. Mundane details suddenly jump out at her. She feels the raw gravity of the loss in her body. The brain instructs the lungs to pump / within a vacuum (1) as she walks back to the room that now contains all the bodies I knew / in varying states of decomposition (2). Instead of softening details, the speaker becomes a clear-eyed witness: Here is the attempt to close your mouth. We were lied to. / This was not a slow slip. There was pain (6).
In this section, the speaker is haunted by her grandfather’s physical deterioration, skin webs over ribs, thins and hangs / beneath the eyeholes (11), and by the intimate work of tending to him in his final days, trying to comfort the person who once took care of her. Death, here, is not abstract. You can hear it, see it, smell it. Bebenek makes us feel these scenes on a visceral level, even as she resists grief giving way to meaning. At this point in the orbit, this is simply what loss feels like.
The grandfather’s deterioration even begins to colour the speaker’s perception of the natural world. In the garden, she imagines a dead squirrel on a path, its body strangely untouched:
the soft sway of its tail
in the breeze, the morning light
in its glossy almond eyes. (15)
Wonder how life left it / so intact,she asks. This question immediately pulls us from the squirrel in the flowerbed back into the antiseptic hospice room, where the grandfather’s deteriorated body lies in stark contrast.
As we reach the end of part one, the speaker addresses her future self, whom we meet in part two:
From wherever I am, I will
send word like a golden thread,
roll an unravelling ball through time
toward myself. (29)
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Part 2: Apoapsis
If the first half of the book keeps us in close orbit around the grandfather’s death, the second finds us at the widest arc, looking back. Time has passed. It is now seven years after your death, and the speaker notes that the body’s cells shed and renew completely / every seven years, which means she is totally new (38). While she may not be the same granddaughter we met in part one, she still exists in relation to the loss of her grandfather.
Even from this new vantage point, she does not pretend that time has turned grief into easy wisdom: Life is not a place I’ve come to recover / climb enlightenment one rung at a time (37). She underscores this in the second of three poems entitled “Trust”: When someone tells me / this will all have been worth it. / Yes and no. I mean, / this will all have been (39). She understands the loss has changed her and will continue changing her because [w]hen you break, you are guaranteed / never to come back together as you were (55), all while acknowledging that change is slow and ongoing, taking years for a body to envelop, dissolve / whatever hard thing was put in them while they slept (43).
She can now move further away from the details of the grandfather’s failing body and see he was [n]ot a body. Or not / only. He was not / the fluids that leaked from him. // He left me so much / more than his remains (51). While the experience of her grandfather’s loss remains a fixed point, she can now admit: I loved him. I was loved // by / him. / It never gets easier than that (51).
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In No One Knows Us There, Bebenek does not try to make grief make sense. There are no tidy revelations. Mourning is messy. Watching someone you love die is ugly. Grief lodges itself in the body and continues to change you. The comfort this collection offers is that we do keep orbiting our dead, our perspectives shifting, our language changing, all while their absence remains central to who we are. It is in this honesty that a different type of solace can be found, one that does not ask you to “get over” anything. Bebenek’s poems tell us that even though we will never escape grief’s orbit, we can learn how to live and remake ourselves under the influence of its ongoing pull.
To cite this article:
Jessica Bebenek is coming to the Frye Festival!
- FRYE Cabaret — April 25 · 7:30 PM
- How Far the Light Reaches — April 27 · 6 PM
- Poetry & Zine-Making for Self-Expression: a workshop with Jessica Bebenek — April 28 · 3 PM
Vanessa Moeller
Vanessa’s poems and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals including The Fiddlehead, Prism International, The Antigonish Review, CV2, and The Pottersfield Portfolio. Her first collection, Our Extraordinary Monsters, was published by Signature Editions. Her work has also appeared in anthologies by Guernica Editions, Baseline Press, Frog Hollow Press, and Owl’s Head Press. She has worked on Qwerty and The Fiddlehead and as an associate poetry editor for Goose Lane Editions. She completed her MA in creative writing at the University of New Brunswick.
A passionate arts advocate, Vanessa was Deputy Director of the New Brunswick Arts Board (artsnb) for several years and continues to support the arts community through several volunteer positions at arts organizations.
Now residing in Moncton, Vanessa is Senior Creative Writer at m5 the agency, Atlantic Canada’s largest integrated communications agency.
Jessica Bebenek
