The Presence of Absence: Jaclyn Desforges Reviews The Book of Benjamin, Missing Matrilineal, and Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait

March 15, 2024

The Book of Benjamin. Ben Robinson. Palimpsest Press. $21.95, 200 pp., ISBN: 978-1-990293-60-3

Content warning: infant loss

1.

As far as I can tell, there’s only one other Jaclyn Desforges. She goes by Jackie, lives in LA, and, weirdly enough, is also a writer. In contrast, there are a lot of Ben Robinsons – enough to fill half of this particular Ben Robinson’s poetry collection with Ben Robinson-based news snippets: on the lefthand pages of the book, a parade of faceless Ben Robinsons chair committees, get arrested, comment on financial reports and save people from house fires. The presence of Ben Robinsons is almost overwhelming. All the while, on the right side, our Ben – the author of the The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) – writes about his personal history, the other Benjamins in his life, and the biblical Benjamin of The Book of Genesis. 

Amidst the presence of all these Benjamins, the book is built around a central absence – that of our Ben’s sister, Emily, who was stillborn. The intersection between the overwhelming presence of Benjamins and the ever-present absence of Emily is where the meaning in this collection lies. It’s a book about identity, grief, naming, and the inescapable terror of parenthood. 

Our Ben shows us the missing family photos in the album from 1996, the year of Emily’s birth. He shows us the biblical Benjamin missing from his brother’s journey to Egypt, and the time our Ben’s brother, Sam, went missing in the night. He shows us the eventual removal of the tree above Emily’s memorial plaque. “The stump of the pussywillow tree is still there, still lodged in the soil when I pull on it,” Robinson writes. “I remove a piece of bark and slip it into my pocket.” The book ends with the birth of the author’s own son, and that official act of naming: filling out the necessary forms for the baby’s birth certificate and health card. “When the documents arrive in the mail,” Robinson writes, “they come addressed to my son.” (I still remember how strange it was to fish my daughter’s first government letter out of the mailbox – a human who didn’t exist just days before now existed, and she had a piece of plastic to prove it.)

I don’t have a neat and tidy explanation for you about what all this means. What I will tell you is that this collection made me cry both times I read it, and that it’s written with a heartfelt directness that is rare and precious in poetry. It left me with feelings I can’t name or explain, which is maybe the best thing I could ask for.

Missing Matrilineal. nina jane drystek. above/ground press. $5.00.

2.

When I chose the collections to juxtapose for this review, I absolutely did not look for connections in advance. I chose two chapbooks that appealed to me: Missing Matrilineal by nina jane drystek and Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self Portrait by Sophia Magliocca, both published in 2023 by above/ground press. But I was immediately struck by the pervasive feeling of absence in drystek’s collection: The first poem, “i haven’t found the ladle yet,” begins with the image of an empty bowl. drystek creates a portrait of memory, loss and grief by focusing on what remains after a beloved person’s death: “the row of cedars he planted,” she writes. “the quilts she sewed.” drystek’s poems are spacious and vivid, dancing between English, Polish and French. We see wallpaper curls and cupboard-aged whiskey, imagine borscht on our tongues. 

In the final and longest poem, “my second sister makes her apparition,” the speaker addresses her sister Isabelle who, as we learn later in the acknowledgements, “lived for the briefest of moments.” Still reeling from The Book of Benjamin, I was struck by the lines “a girl unborn / est une femme fantôme,” “surely there is dust that remembers,” “a body that wasn’t,” and “name that is.” This collection is intimate and tender – full of grief and bittersweetness. It’s about death, which is another way of saying it’s about love.  

Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait. Sophia Magliocca. above/ground press. $5.00.

While drystek’s chapbook is a collage of objects left behind, Magliocca’s is, as the title indicates, a self-portrait. In the first movement of the collection, the speaker lists details about herself – “I’m a fast talker slow walker average daughter,” Magliocca writes. “I’m a good swimmer for three strokes.” The first poem, “Note,” is made up of a single stanza, but as Magliocca goes on, the poems begin to break apart – the next three contain four quatrains, and as the speaker goes on, revealing increasingly vulnerable details, Magliocca adds white space and staggered line breaks. “I spend my evenings in the bathroom / staring at that face / stretched across the chrome drain,” she writes. By page 11 of the chapbook, the repeated word “memories” snakes across the page, and on page 17, the second movement of the collection begins with what the speaker is afraid to carry: “big boxes up / narrow staircases / rusty knives on flat trays.” Then, after a long gap, the word babies appears neatly in the centre of the page. The final poem begins, “I know nine months is 274 days.” It appears on the page like a series of waves, or the curves of a body, and goes on to explore the complex feelings surrounding the speaker’s abortion. “I know your would-be birthday,” Magliocca writes. “fire sign like your father / imagine soft curls / auburn.” And there again, the immovable presence of absence – that blank space of might-have-been.

Jaclyn Desforges is the 2023/2024 Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer In Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. She’s the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Jaclyn was a finalist for the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize and her writing has been featured in literary magazines across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.