Long before poems evolved into the written forms we hold in our hands, they lived orally, embodied in the voices of their creators and passed down in the echoes of those who held each poem in their memory. As a part of that lineage, I most enjoy spoken word poetry, and it was among the spoken word poets of YouTube, that I first encountered Sabrina Benaim. In her 2017 debut collection, Depression & Other Magic Tricks, published by Button Poetry, Benaim dazzles with a trick she does not name – the ability to maintain the essence of oral tradition in a written form.
At the age of 23, Benaim learned that she had a tumor the size of a squash ball in her throat. A close friend told her that the (noncancerous) tumor must be a physical manifestation of all the words she swallowed and advised her to start speaking her poems aloud in a spoken word workshop. Thus began Benaim’s journey from secret journal poet to spoken word poet and published author. The response to her performance of “explaining my depression to my mother” gifted Benaim a breakthrough in which she came to understand that she was not as alone as she felt. Depression & Other Magic Tricks is a testament to that breakthrough, and to the healing that comes from voicing our swallowed thoughts, fears, and feelings.
In an age of widespread loneliness and increasing mental illness, this collection asks without asking, whether loneliness is the cause or the effect of depression, identifying factors like absentee dads, loved ones who pass away, and lost romances. These poems wrestle with the endurance of memory, love, and the human spirit in the face of time, loss, mental illness, and other things that we cannot control. Through unadorned vulnerability, accessible language, unmissable allusions, beautiful extended metaphors, and other subtle craft choices, Benaim allows us to walk alongside her as she navigates and exposes the inexplicable nature of depression and anxiety in day to day life. This is especially evident, in the aforementioned “explain my depression to my mother” and in “the slow now”, which so vividly illustrates how ordinary depression seems, how it slows down our perception of time, and how it distorts our sense of victory.
Benaim’s shifting use point of view throughout the book helps readers to experience movement between “normalcy” and depression and anxiety. At times the speaker addresses us, at times, the speaker addresses themselves, and at times, the speaker addresses others directly, such as her father, former partners, and even Beyonce. However, when Benaim uses third person point of view to refer to herself, we step into disembodied feelings associated with depression and anxiety. In each of the 5 “magic trick” poems, Benaim opts for this point of view and even goes so far as to point it out in “girl beside you”.
i don’t know how to connect in a world like this
in times like these,
when I can’t even speak about myself in the first person.
Likewise, Benaim conveys the all-consuming nature of depression, by referring to herself, and even her name as the hard thing(s).
in my story,
i am the protagonist & the bad thing,
I have to learn how to bend the light out of myself
-“on releasing light”
…goodbye is the saddest word i know. the saddest word you know is my name.
-“the loneliest sweet potato”
Similarly, Benaim includes revised poems in this collection to show the transformative power of naming, accepting, and learning how to cope with depression and anxiety. Benaim uses the whole of each poem’s form to convey the speaker’s own coherency during, or understanding of their experience. Sometimes the speaker is almost rambling as they process their emotions, and other times they have moments of clarity, where some aspect of their experience comes sharply into focus. Benaim also references and revises many song lyrics that mean something to her, then by extension and revision, mean something to us. Her chosen form, erasure poetry, also speaks to the way that mental illness changes us.
Benaim uses beautiful images and throughlines to show how we both change and endure despite those things that we cannot control. Some of her most persistent and beautiful images include clocks, balloons, moons, candles, birds, and coffee.
Benaim’s ability to maintain the essence of oral tradition in a written form is apparent on the page, in the way that she uses white space, enjambment, and grammatical choices to help us hear her voice and all its varied emotional tones through each poem. For example, her deliberate abandon of capitalization throughout (with some exceptions) and the replacement of the word “and” with its symbol, give the reader pause and strip away some formality –like letting readers glace at a text or listen in on a conversation with a friend. Like her casual application of grammatical rules, Benaim’s casual tone conveys poem as conversation. While maintaining her use of metaphor, she speaks plainly. This approach makes her work widely accessible. The conversational tone removes distance and adds intimacy by sitting the reader across from the writer, rather than demanding the reader look up at the writer from their pedestal of mastery and formality.
Benaim’s use of allusions and cliché sharpens the associated images and brings with them affective waves of nostalgia, along with the weight of each referenced image or idea. This is beautifully demonstrated in “so my friend tells me she identifies as a mermaid...” - its subtext and the irony of Ariel’s own wish mirrored in our own – a wish to be on the other side of our given realities.
“if you're just trying to sing & brush your hair with a fork without judgment, you can totally do that. some people will throw you the side eye, disregard them as crabs. OR are you just trying to say you're magic, BUT not that regular, pedestrian, witch type of magic. is mermaid magic better?”
Another one of Benaim’s magic tricks is her haunting ability to end and to turn a poem. This is especially evident in the aforementioned “so my friend tells me she identifies as a mermaid...”.
maybe i am a mermaid too. if being a mermaid means you've cried enough tears to drown your grasp of reality… then yes, i think i am definitely a mermaid. & every song i've ever sung has filled my lungs with sea, but i am not drowning - not like i thought i was when i was human.
Benaim’s work in this collection is indeed magical. Her subtle craft choices and deep considerations provide us with a safe space to ask ourselves what truths and pains we have swallowed, to admit our unnamed struggles, like loneliness, anxiety, and depression, and to rest assured that above all else, we are not alone.