Review of Jessica Bebenek’s Fourth Walk

Fourth Walk is the third chapbook by Montréal-based poet Jessica Bebenek, one of three titles put out by microlit publisher Desert Pets Press this past spring. In the opening stanzas of “Accismus,” the second poem in the collection, the poet unites two distinct and seemingly irreconcilable incarnations of the lyric voice: the personal, invested, ostensibly sincere voice that has been associated with the very word “lyric” since at least the European Romantics, and a distant, ironic voice. The poem’s title brings attention to this bifurcation. The Encyclopædia Britannica defines accismus as “a form of irony in which a person feigns indifference to or pretends to refuse something he or she desires.” Accismus, then, and Bebenek’s experiment with the mode, combines emotional investment with an affected aloofness:

I arrived in this poemslant. Fell out. Tried againto give this heartbreak breath,a name. I called usa desert, distance—opened upthe five city blocksof our dissonance.

The poems in Fourth Walk are often urbane, their world hyper-modern (the fourth poem in the collection is titled “Shopping for Housewares at Dollarama,” the fifth, “Cosmos,” is an address to popular science superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson), and the poet certainly does not shy away from word play (see word slant cited above). The overall perspective, however, is far from distant or ironic. The speaker in “Accismus,” for example, adopts an initial emotional distance only to tear it back down, and in this, the poem takes on a certain programmatic role for the collection.Many of the poems in Bebenek’s third chapbook, however, don’t bother with the affected refutation of “Accismus” and jump right into emotional grittiness instead. The central sequence of five poems considers the death of the speaker’s grandfather, laying claim to a poetic sincerity. The first of these, “This is the Morning of a Meaningless Sparrow at the Window,” opens on a raw, frank image stripped of any ornate artifice, favouring instead a simple progression by anaphora:

This is not Alan.This is wincinga shrunken man, fleshloosed from the bone.This is a body letting go.This is the stench of cellslungs rotting and exitingspore by spore through the mouth.This is existenceloosening its ties to reality.

This middle section follows the speaker through her grandfather’s last days, his death, and the ensuing mourning period. The linear narrative allows for significant emotional exploration, in which larger concerns about love, the body, and grief are brought into focus.

In laying claim to the emotional, the familial, and the corporal, Bebenek incarnates a feminine (and feminist) ethos ...

In other poems, the tone is ludic, the voice often witty. Underneath this playfulness, however, the speaker maintains a certain gravity. The puns in “Two Night Stand” are offset by the speaker’s more serious observations:

I rode you to a finish, kissto close your lineless lips. What slowedwas not our hearts, not time:the portion of my sight that caughtthe space between our skins.

In Fourth Walk, Bebenek incarnates two distinct modes, or rather, a hybrid voice, terribly clever, but also terribly sincere. Consider, for example, the closing stanzas of the poem “The Garden,” which ends the suite on the grandfather’s death:

Probably somewhere a squirrel is smelling a flower or something.[…]Somewhere in the garden a squirrellay dead. Imagine this bodyon the path in the flower bed:the soft sway of its tailin the breeze, the morning lightin its glossy almond eyes.Wonder how life left itso intact.

From an initial nonchalance, the speaker moves to existential concerns. The first squirrel is inconsequential, but in a deft move that almost resembles a correctio, the speaker considers a second squirrel, this one dead, and compares it implicitly to her grandfather, suggesting a certain universality in the experiences of death, loss, and mourning. In laying claim to the emotional, the familial, and the corporal, Bebenek incarnates a feminine (and feminist) ethos, not unlike that found in Klara Du Plessis’s chapbook Wax Lyrical (Anstruther Press, 2015), which presents, among other things, an unflinching consideration of the female body. Like Du Plessis, Bebenek writes with a frankness and an authority that are hard to ignore.

Annick MacAskill’s poems and reviews have recently appeared in Prism, The Rusty Toque, Versal, Room, and CV2. Her poetry has been longlisted for the CBC’s Poetry Prize, longlisted for The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart. She is the author of a chapbook, Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016), and a forthcoming full-length début (Gaspereau Press, 2018). MicroLit Reviews is an ongoing series on The Town Crier. We’re looking for 400-600 word reviews of micro press books, chapbooks, broadsides, zines, visual poetry, digital literature projects, and everything else weird and wonderful being made in literary communities across North America. Please send all submissions or pitches to [email protected] with the subject heading: MicroLit Reviews Submission.