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.

(From Book*hug Press)

No One Knows Us There is available in April 2025.

Jessica Bebenek is a queer interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator living between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. Bebenek's writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry.Her recent chapbooks include You Don't Get Out Much (2024), I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM (Gap Riot, 2022), and What is Punk (2019). She made the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for her poem Lament.