Alexander Hollenberg, Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos: Poems

 

WILD RASPBERRY

Amongst the deep magenta
stalks fringing the valley 

where everything else is still
corduroy dull, steeped in the peaty 

ooze of premature thaw,
several metaphors emerge, 

but this is not the place to say them.
Here there is only the language 

of inchoate raspberry, nothing yet
useful, nothing to nourish 

the imagining of myself or of you, only
the stubborn purpling shoots, tangled 

parenthesis (see, here I go again)
resisting the logic of supplement, 

bowing back to the earth, as if
not yet ready to be seen or taken away.

I’m just now moving through the full-length debut from Hamilton, Ontario “poet and professor of storytelling” Alexander Hollenberg, his Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), one of the final titles to be produced by the outgoing iteration of the legendary Canadian literary publisher, Gaspereau Press. “On the eve of the new semester,” begins the piece “SESTINA FOR THE MODERNISTS,” “the professor stares back at the / portrait of Joyce on his wall wondering whether anyone will care / this year about stream of consciousness, modernism, the novel, or / will the readings remain not read but faintly falling away—where / once there was pleasure in chiasmus [.]” There’s such heft to these pieces, whether set as prose poem, explorations in form or across more traditional lyric modes, narratively thick and layered, allowing an incredible amount of language in a packed space. His poems provide both intimacy and grand gestures, threading meditative and storytelling elements across crafted lines. As the poem “ON THE SHORES OF / LAKE WINNIPEG, A VIKING” begins: “From the apocryphal horns / of the very old man / with an enormous axe, / sandpipers and sweet pickerel // archipelago— / an arc of fin and beak and wing / and ancient eye carved / into the Ptolemaic prairie // sky— [.]”

Set in five sections—“Spruce Crow,” “Cod Jigging near Twillingate,” “Children of Atlantis,” “The Human/it/(y)/(ies)” and “Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos”—there are ways in which his tales offer shades of stretched truths and mythology, writing on what might not be what at first it appears. “When he took me to the Mercedes dealership,” he writes, as the fourth poem, “RETIREMENT,” of the five-poem sequence “ORIGIN STORY, WITH PYJAMA FACTORY,” “I cared only / for windshield wipers on the headlights. This was the future // even more than human robot heroes / in bed with me every night.” There’s a scope, a scale, to the storytelling that is quite fascinating; expansive, far larger than the bounds of the poems, the page. An expansiveness and a slowness, quite purposeful, allowing the small moments to accompany one across such a space without getting or feeling lost. “In the whirligig of autumn air,” begins the single-stanza prose poem “WAX SKY, WITH FISH,” “a parliament erupts. All matter of / fish slip from the stitches between clouds.”