By Meredith Grace Thompson
In I Love You, Call Me Back, Sabrina Benaim’s words speak directly into my mouth with a pre-pandemic intimacy which makes my skin shudder. Her speaker lives in isolation, compelled by brief interludes of virtual contact, distinctly within the moment of a summer in lockdown. She breathes video chats and walking her dog, cups of coffee on the stoop, and bird song. Her days are filled with cleaning rituals and phone calls with her mother and cooking. Her mind seems to exist within her body—tied very much to her body and yet floating beyond it somehow. Her relationships have become distances without intention . She watches her new nephew grow through a computer screen and listens to her sick mother describe what will come after she is gone, over the telephone.
i am watching my nephew laugh for the first time
through a screen
i am watching my mother watch my nephew laugh (p.24)
Encapsulating the strangeness of pandemic isolation, Benaim writes a temporary yet inexhaustible reflection and refraction of self. Self-love; self-indulgence masquerading as self-care; self-care morphing into unfettered self-hatred, clawing its way back up up up into a healing, a growing together. A scar tissue collective sprouting into a blossoming nuance of form.
She cascades through an inconsistently poignant use of capital letters— a lowercase i showing perhaps the deterioration self, perhaps the oneness of self. She captures through poetic form the layered depths of the rabbit hole which isolation opens up in the mind of the isolated. And while her body might be doing this or that, the mind of Benaim’s speaker is not limited to the same apartment, city, or time, but rather traverses freely through what came before and what is yet to come. Dreaming and daydreaming together at once.
Benaim captures a moment of forced stillness, forced separation, relocation, and reflection where everything feels stalled, stagnant, reflective, spinning, and without a clear sense of time. Dates mark some of the poems to allow the reader a foothold within this swirling, mesmerising world, but being swept up into those swirling waters is the joy of Benaim’s writing.
i have vivid dreams
in all of them
my mother is alive (p. 98)
A world which becomes comfortable to the speaker, at risk of perhaps not wanting to leave again.
I hope the mail
stays undelivered
I do not wish
to have my belongings back. (p. 57)
Benaim’s explorations of a self inside the extenuating circumstances of the pandemic are to be commended. Her poetry is fearless in its content, ranging from the deeply intimate nature of mental health and discussions of depression and body image, to the wild intimacy of the utterly mundane details of daily life (one poem is an excellent recipe for roasted cauliflower). For what could be more intimate than to be invited into the everyday of another human being, simply existing? The collection as a whole is a moment perfectly captured, leaving the reader with aftertastes of sunbeams and heavy summer air brimming with the strange daydreaming silence of mid-pandemic lockdown.
...You bring yellow flowers
every Monday when you arrive home.
I keep them out on the wooden table
no taller than a tulip standing
on the shoulders of another tulip. (p. 23)