If Fire, Then Bird

“Jessica Bebenek’s ‘Selections from No One Knows Us There’ is full of ambitious, exploratory poems about grief and its after-effects,” said the jury. “Written with a big red broken heart, but built on a base of technical acumen and sturdy music, it brings the whole chaos of youthful mourning to light in episodes of drama, insight, and humour. Its achievement is one of poetry’s most difficult: to raise despair to an aesthetic act by honouring, and not merely decorating, its core of personal tragedy.”.