Grief’s Unmaking and Remaking of the Self
A Review of No One Knows Us There by Jessica Bebenek (Book*hug Press, 2025)
by Dinah Ryan
76 pp., paperback, $22.95
April 08, 2025
Book*hug Press
ISBN: 9781771669399
To confront the dissolution of the body, whether that body is another’s or one’s own, is to come unmade. Another’s death is our own death, our own death is another’s. The poems in Jessica Bebenek’s debut collection, No One Knows Us There, intertwine such endings: the inevitable denouements of illness, aging, death, decomposition, the preparation of a corpse for cremation or burial. She observes the corporeality of this separation of self from self in nuanced detail. The methodical litany of the embalmer’s labor in “Forestalled Decomposition for Public Display,” for example, ends with the embalmer’s basement as ontology’s locale: “Down here, there are no lies. / The sky is no longer a place.” Being is rooted firmly in the physical in Bebenek’s poems, and this materiality imbricates time, love, isolation, precarity, immensity, repetition, and transmutation.
Mourning is a continual process. It is not an accident that the homonyms “morning” and “mourning” echo throughout the collection. In “On the Night of the Morning My Grandfather Died,” under a “moon and its illusion of light . . . my father and I drank / like mourning and drinking are what we had been born to do.” To be grieving and dispossessed is to be alive, and thus to be tasked with repair, with remaking what is incessantly unmade.
The collection’s structure itself embodies the vacillation between the grief of inevitable death and the constant renewal that is a function of the persistence of love, regeneration, and “this silly business of time / opening its coat to us, bloated / with existence” (“the thing that made us”). No One Knows Us There is in two parts, the first written in the aftermath of the poet’s grandfather’s final hospice care and death; the second is written some years later as despair has transformed into a steady hold on grief as part of the teeming, vivid urgency of living.
Bebenek offers readers an experience in which suffering and the immediacy of the present moment form an almost physical presence. Her work as a visual artist informs the structure of the book, which is permeated by her understanding of handbound book structures, her use of reclaimed materials, her performance piece in which she knitted—made corporeal and wearable—the rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, another poem of mourning and reconciliation. The two parts of No One Knows Us There evoke the two blocks of a handbound book that are sewn together with exposed, inventive Coptic or French link stitches. Linking patterns emerge in the titles that repeat asymmetrically in each half and in the colorful threads of images winding throughout the book, appearing and disappearing, only to reappear again.
No One Knows Us There enacts the very remaking that constitutes recovery from suffering, although this recovery is neither simple nor definitive. It is part endless stitching, part endless reclamation.
Our own narratives of illness and recovery may be essential for us. Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago, 2013) excavates the stories that people tell as they try to come to grips with illness. These stories range from what he calls “the restitution narrative”—characterized by insistence on the inevitability of healing—to the “chaos narrative,” in which coherence can never be restored. Meanwhile, “quest narratives,” attempting to inhabit the storyteller’s own voice and lived experience, “meet suffering head on; they accept suffering and seek to use it.” He calls on the work of Eric Cassell and Arthur Kleinman who clinically defined suffering as a “body-self” confronting the disintegration of every aspect of being. “Stories of suffering have two sides,” Frank writes, “the threat of disintegration . . . and emphasis on resistance, [seeking] a new integration of the body-self.” This weaving of destruction, chaos, and loss with the threads of discovery and of a reemergent but altered self permeates Bebenek’s work.
No One Knows Us There enacts the very remaking that constitutes recovery from suffering, although this recovery is neither simple nor definitive. It is part endless stitching, part endless reclamation. That process exists, as Bebenek writes in “The Island,” in the continually mundane: “Here again // in imperfect future / life just goes on . . . Only this and nothing more / then only this again.” She conjures in “Raccoons” the scrounging process in which something usable can be found in the detritus of life’s mess:
We are in love
with what everyone else
calls trash
We wash
our stinky rat
paws to watch
the dirt swirl
remake
Nothing will ever be as it was since death represents inevitable and irretrievable loss. Decay seeps into everything. In Bebenek’s grimly Gothic “Hic Iacet Sepultus,” written at Haworth Parsonage where the Brontë siblings lived and died young, “the rain’s slow slip / through decomposing bodies layered on bodies” in the graveyard poisons the groundwater. Everyone is at risk. “Even the cemetery cat kicked the bucket,” Bebenek writes with one of her characteristic flashes of wry humor, before ending with the poignantly enigmatic, “Spring is an ancient word meaning / dead birds, sweet God, / their crooked corpses are everywhere.” No one gets out alive, no being is invulnerable to death’s pervasive presence.
And yet, love seeps into everything, too. In the first iteration of “The Way Fish Drown,” in the collection’s first section, “My grandpa died gasping, mouth open / to gulp whatever life had yet to bring him . . . Death / is a full stop we lace // into chronology.” The poem’s second iteration raises the possibility of the persistent presence of love:
The truth then:
I loved him.
I was loved
by
him.
It never gets easier than that.
Elegant, redolent images of time, love, infinity, the body, and the other move through these poems like atoms colliding and perpetually reforming.
“Love as an Instinct” observes a family of loons, as so much of No One Knows Us There pauses to turn an astute and empathic attention on the richness and vulnerability of the natural world. The narrator sits on a boat launch, watching a “single loon, smooth / and dark-headed, bobbing with two fuzzy chicks so small they disappeared / behind waves torn up by the wind.” The loon calls and their partner replies, the repeated call and response occurring until the partner appears, and the narrator watches the laughter between the two, the lively antics of family life and of companionship. In the end, the poem becomes a meditation on what gets dismissed as “instinct” when contrasted with human intentionality. With an almost visible shrug, this poem refuses to differentiate the human and the animal, the intentional and the instinctive, the physical and the spiritual. Love is, simply, present, “As if the loons were / oblivious to why they sang or hunted, or as if we aren’t. / As if our love is anything more than an impulse, a series of actions— / a calling-out, a laugh, a bringing of mouth to mouth.”
Elegant, redolent images of time, love, infinity, the body, and the other move through these poems like atoms colliding and perpetually reforming. Bebenek’s voice can be dryly witty, as in “Cosmos,” which speaks directly to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s accessible television programs from the viewer’s vantage point (“Fill me again / with beer and then weed and then food / and then a little more weed. You know / what I need . . . ”). Even in the midst of self-deprecating humor—“Neil, I have so many ideas. / What is your mailing address?”—Bebenek focuses, laser-like, on the central questions gnawing at every being: “There are so / many things, Neil deGrasse Tyson, rushing / away from us at exponentially increasing speeds / and only one thing rushing toward us.”
But Bebenek’s emphasis is, finally, on gently recovering over time from perpetual grief. Although the Japanese method of visible repair by creating seams of gold is a familiar image, Bebenek’s “Kintsugi” offers an acceptance of “a burst and blended being— // Ragged!— / Imperfect!— // Yes!— / Ever-new…” And “Moths” offers a kindly tolerance for small daily destructions, such as the fluttering insects “trapped / in the papermaking studio” chewing through the fibers of the artist’s creations. “I won’t ever destroy them / for being / as it is in their nature to be” because “I would still be here / I would remain.”
In the end, it is some measure of trust that permits the self to journey on. But this trust is not placed in some dogma or in a philosophical or spiritual system. Rather, the two poems titled “Trust” concluding each part of No One Knows Us There simply accept being itself as an ongoing project. The first, at the end of the more despairing first section, responds to the saccharine suggestion that “this will all have been worth it” with simply, “Yes and no. I mean / this will all have been.” In section two’s return to “Trust,” mourning becomes the morning, finally, and there is a sense of beginning endlessly:
I am just starting
ever just starting still
in the morning of my life.
Dinah Ryan is a writer whose practice includes fiction, poetry, cultural criticism, and independent curation. She is a contributing editor for Art Papers and Professor Emerita of English at Principia College, where she was the Cornelius Ayer and Muriel Prindle Wood Professor of the Humanities.
