Jessica Bebenek’s debut is divided into two sections that explore, in turn, grief and early adulthood, but these themes aren’t entirely separate. Instead, they extend across the collection, with the poems in the first half feeding into the next. The book opens with the aftermath of a grandfather’s death and eschews melodrama in favour of the mundane, listing all the things the living must do in the wake of tragedy: make funeral arrangements, walk around, buy overpriced coffee.

By breaking actions into their component parts, Bebenek paints an accurate picture of grief – how it can make you both glassy-eyed and allow you to see the world more clearly. By the end of the first poem, the speaker has dispensed with euphemism entirely: “Here is the attempt to close your mouth. We were lied to. / This was not a slow slip. There was pain.”

For all its restraint, No One Knows Us There looks upon the world with a barely concealed wonder. What makes this an assured debut is its ability to make nature sing and to string the contemporary world to its elemental past. Bebenek has a great ear for near or internal rhyme: descriptions of present-day Montreal and Toronto are interlaced with “the morning / of a meaningless sparrow at the window,” the “magenta abalones” of a sunken eyelid, and deer’s hooves smacking “a path of broken asphalt slabs.”

Bebenek is ultimately able to metabolize nature writing, astrophysics, and ancient Rome in a way that the work sustains life, even as it swirls around death. Her curiosity where these concepts are concerned is perhaps a rejection of stoic philosophy. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, time “is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by.” Bebenek’s time, on the other hand, is fecund, and open to absorbing more: “Time exists not as a river, but a pond / in which we float / with all the other stories.”mRb