12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alexander Hollenberg

Alexander Hollenberg is the author of Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos (Gaspereau 2025). Some of his recent poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2025, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, and The New Quarterly. He is the past winner of CV2’s 2-Day Poem Contest and has been longlisted for several other awards, including the CBC Poetry Prize, the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. He is from Hamilton, Ontario.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The most immediate answer is confidence. Now I have this artifact, this beautiful material thing that I can hold in my hands that is a record of my labour and imagination. It’s also a manifestation of a community of support—of publishers and editors and readers and friends and colleagues who believe in the work along with me. I’m not saying the confidence will last forever; the rejection letters continue. But the community also continues.

Before Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos, I wrote mostly academic stuff. Lots of narrative theory, ethics, and even ecocritical theory. It’s not that I’ve put those ideas away, but with the new book I’ve tried to find a new voice for them and a new medium. I think it’s working. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’m drawn to poetry because the claim it makes on a reader’s time is humble. It asks for a relatively small moment but in that moment asks for you to pay close attention and linger just a bit. It may be lyric, it may be narrative, it may be some strange hybrid, but when a poem’s at its best, it can rattle life back into you before you have to move on to other things.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am a very slow writer and starting something is always the most difficult. I’ll look at my watch and realize I’ve been writing (and deleting) a poem’s first line for half a day. I have trouble moving onto the next line before I’m happy with what came before. I’m not sure that’s healthy or sustainable if I want to keep writing books, but that’s where I’m at right now. Still, that also means when I finally do finish a draft (of a poem, or even a whole book), I’ve already done so much editing-as-I-go, that it does look somewhat close to what the final work will become.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I think I always have a book in mind when I start writing poems, though that image of my book mutates with every new poem I write. Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos started off as a very different collection, but as I re-read some of my earlier poems, it helped crystallize what I was actually interested in and where my most creative insights actually were.

Some days when I sit down to write, I know I want to write a new poem, but I have no clue what I want to write about. When that happens, I’ll start with an image and just try to follow it until it’s no longer familiar. This is also, incidentally, how I condition myself to fall asleep on those nights my mind won’t stop racing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m new enough at this poetry thing that I still love public readings. The fact that people will gather from across cities and towns and countries to listen to someone read poems fills me with joy and hope for all things human. I’ve not really considered public readings as part of my creative process, though hearing an audience react in real time to a certain line or word or phrase—gasps, laughs, grunts, scoffs, or whatever else—does very quickly let me know what may work and what may not. That said, I think a poem is always at least two poems: the poem that is read (and seen) on the page and the poem that is heard (but not seen). An audience may not hear my line breaks, but they matter; likewise, a poem read aloud makes different things more emphatic.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The big one I grappled with when writing Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos was how to write about the non-human world without instrumentalizing it. In other words, how do we tell stories about things that do not tell stories without turning those things into something they are not? I’m certainly not the first poet to think about how to write ethically about nature. But I really am interested—and I suspect I will continue to be for the foreseeable future—in the ways narrative becomes audacious and arrogant, even in the midst of its beauty as a “technology.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I ask my students this same question, and we always, all of us, equivocate. I think the writer’s role, at its root, is to demand that we pay sustained attention to the world. To demand that we keep reading and keep thinking about things, even when others would demand we stop thinking and just consume. At the same time, that’s a lot of symbolic pressure on any individual writer. And maybe too much pressure, especially for emerging writers. Maybe a writer’s role is just to write—to be unequivocally, absolutely human.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

One of my favourite parts of the publishing process is working with an editor. Sure, it can be difficult, and it can poke a little at your ego. But what a true gift it is to have someone who sees real value in your work and is dedicating themself to make it even better. Maybe I’m naïve, but I think there’s an inborn kindness to the work of editors—shepherds and surgeons and soothsayers, all of them.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Always leave something for the next day. Don’t exhaust yourself. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway says he learned “never to empty the well… but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” Very practically, I’ll try to leave a sentence or phrase or idea to come back to so I’m not starting from a blank page.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I love writing in the mornings, but the problem is mornings are when I’m most productive for everything else in my life, too. If 1:00 pm rolls around and a task isn’t started, it’s going to be very slow-going. Ideally, I write for an hour or two after I walk the dog and feel really great that I completed something, which sustains me through all of life’s other daily exigencies. Mind you, this is an ideal—i.e. very rarely does it happen this way.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Other authors, typically. One of my get-out-of-my-rut strategies is to return to strict poetic forms. For example, I’ll find a poem I love, then find a line I love, and then I’ll try to write a golden shovel poem. Or a glosa. There’s something about using a piece of writing that you love as a starting point that makes you feel less alone. Even if I end up tossing that poem, I feel less alone and less empty.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My dad was a pediatric neurosurgeon, so he worked really long hours. More days than not, he’d come home for dinner and then go back to work right after. But on the nights he didn’t have to return to the hospital, he’d pour himself a small scotch on the rocks. The scent of Cutty Sark blended scotch whisky will always remind me of home.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

There’s a lot of fishing and a lot of forests in Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos. Many of the poems germinated on a lake with a fishing rod in my hand or bumbling along a trail in the Hamilton Conservation Authority. There’s something to be said for the way a poem slows you down for a moment, makes you notice things you wouldn’t necessarily pay any attention to in your daily life. When I am staring at a fishing line that’s not catching any fish, or at a colonnade of sentinel pines off-trail, I realize I have borrowed liberally from fishing and forests.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Many of the poems in my book are epigraphed with other authors’ work: Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, William James, Stevie Smith, Robert Kroetsch, Kate Beaton, Billy Collins, W.H. Auden, Nicholas Herring, to name a few. It’s been said before and more eloquently by others, but writing is a conversation, and we are built by other writers.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d very much like to finish writing a novel. Good plot is so hard. If we’re talking about non-writing activities, I want to stand in a river in Wyoming or Montana with a 7-weight fly rod in my hand and a good salami sandwich waiting for me on the bank.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I saw an ad the other day offering arborist training. I think I would enjoy that. I say this having held a chainsaw only once in my life.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I grew up with books all around me. The unspoken rule was every room should have books. For better or worse, writing felt inevitable.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Maria Reva’s Endling is, to me, a perfect novel. It is an object lesson in the way narrative form creates meaning—that is, the way it can shock us into new understandings of our shared, fraught world.

This summer, I fell hard for Carson Lund’s Eephus. An amateur baseball diamond is about to be razed. One last game to be played. It’s silly and deadly serious all at once.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently revising a 14-poem corona of sonnets about the death of the humanities at liberal arts institutions, which I hope will become a chapbook. I’m also working on a new full-length collection of poems, tentatively titled How to Build the Ocean. Long way to go on it, but one of its first poems, “Baseball Game, with Octopus,” was just recently published in the fall issue of CV2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jason Purcell, Crohnic

 

On the banks of the North Saskatchewan I shed
my velvet having to rest again on the white powder 

line snow like a tablet crushed and blown toward the crisp
blank future a shrinking 

place where health and death are the same
temperature where I am calculated and reduced so 

there is less of me to keep alive on the banks
of the North Saskatchewan I sat down and sacrificed

And so reads the opening page, the opening passage, of the second full-length collection by Edmonton poet Jason Purcell, the long poem Crohnic (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), a collection that follows their full-length debut, Swollening (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Documenting the landscape of the experience of navigating endless (timeless) time spent in hospital across a diagnosis and treatment of Crohn’s disease, Purcell’s book-length lyric suite, their long poem, articulates an experience from deep within it through a stitch of lyric bursts, of fragments. “Lindsay gives me the idea for this book.” the second page, the second passage, begins, as Purcell speaks of the original prompt by one of their nurses. As Purcell writes, Crohnic writes of and around the experience of “a severe and long-undiagnosed case of Crohn’s disease, [as] each day I swallow down pills and every month I receive infusions by IV that whittle me down but keep me going in the meantime. Like Lindsay says, intense and persistent medical intervention can feel hard to handle.” Purcell writes passages, lyric bursts and broken lines, composed from within a kind of ongoingness, offering medical updates and snapshots of the river valley just outside the window. As they write, early on: “on the banks of the North Saskatchewan I am too // human and I impose that on everything that isn’t too / clear-cut what ill-suited gaze did I carry down and fix // on this landscape its residents the narcissism of being / damaged and thinking the rest is too // a prescribing cold reaches toward and embraces / me the silver skin lifts and peels from the birch // at my side mosses turn their slow growth north / an animal leaves its fur in the branches.”

The winding architecture of the hand
and wrist hanging from the dorsal venous
arch it crumbles
distributes strain I remember
walking beneath it and hearing
a brook’s jewelled noise against stone
somewhere underground deep
in my body where there is some
reservoir I must draw from so long
as I live in this temporary structure

The collage-journal of the book’s overall structure provides a curious book-length tapestry, reminiscent, somehow (of all things), Vancouver writer George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), as both write through a sequence, a discovery poem, of loosely-connected self-contained narrative bursts across a larger, however loose, project-length narrative. Across their text, Purcell repeats the idea and image of “architecture,” reinforcing the central elements of their narrative structure: a sketchbook of notes while feeling trapped within both their own body and the hospital building. “it is better to stay quiet and allow / all of this to happen I shrink the architecture // of this place loses shape / through each swinging doorway are spaces that grow,” they write, some twenty pages in. These are poems held in temporal space, composed from within a perpetual, endless immediate, where the only passage of time comes through nursing shifts, the weather outside, or the shifts of the seasons.

Looking out to a place I can’t reach
on foot until the snow comes 

under me are the tall generations
of conifers whose generations don’t go 

so far back only as far
as the trampling things grow 

undisturbed far away neglect
blossoms unexpected 

richness the northern bog
violet reseeds its mauves 

across the bare gut plain
over the horizon 

that colours the receding evening’s gaze
neither malign nor benign.

Crohnic follows a loose trajectory of multiple poetry collections addressing issues of illness, whether short-term or long term, moving into elements of disability poetics articulated by prior titles including their own full-length debut, as well as Calgary poet nikki reimer’s [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here], the late Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk’s (1979-2014) Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) [see my review of such here], Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s departures (Winnipeg MN: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Montreal poet Lauren Turner’s The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2020) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], the reissue of Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc’s I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and even Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir, Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024) [see my essay on such here]. The structure of writing extended passages from one’s hospital bed, as well, is reminiscent of Dennis Cooley’s work during a hospital stay after a burst appendix (the central core of the collection departures), elements of which he first articulated across the “new” of his sunfall: new and selected poems 1980-1996 (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1996). Or, as Purcell writes:

But all the while, outside my window, winter goes on, teaching me how to rest. From my apartment perched in the trees of amiskwaciwâskahikan where I convalesce, where I look out onto the North Saskatchewan and her river valley, I learn how to wait. The trees lining the water lose their bulk and stand thin at the banks. The river freezes over with psoriatic plaque. Animals borrow, storing and hunting, knowing not to expend. Outside the city bogs and muskeg bubble, cradling that which slowly decomposes. Winter breathes slowly in sacred dormancy.

I am trying to learn an obvious lesson: everything is entangled in a relationship with life and death. Decay feeds life, and the non-human world does not seem to enforce strict division between these orders; life and death are both a kind of flourishing, co-creating possibilities. Winter puts us to sleep so we can be reborn. I take my prescribed and measured harms so that I can live more fully. The river flows, sheets over, changes state, and then

Anne F. Walker, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length

 

Settling In

Unbelievably small roomette and a lounge car full of light. Full of people, fields, the bay the delta. Just stepping off and stepping in. I have crossed this country with my father, with my mother and sister. With my son and his father. Driven across with furniture as I migrated, first one way, then back. No Wi-Fi on this train. Lifting from Rosedale passing homes with green kidney shaped pools. Dry grassland. A smell of croissant moving through the cars before lunch. Voices waft in snippets, talk about a small round house, internet, taking the train, walking to a sale.

I’ve been aware of Anne F. Walker and her work for some time, aware that she was in Toronto during her early publishing career, having relocated to Berkeley, California for her doctoral work at UC Berkeley, and currently living and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her latest collection is the prose poem suite Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length (Eyewear Publishing Ltd./The Black Spring Press Group, 2025), a collection that self-describes on the back cover thusly: “These 100-word prose poems are contained. They spread between sections. They break out into themselves. They repeat. They reflect on landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories, concentrating on precision of image, narrative, and language.” Prior poetry titles by Walker, for those keeping track, include the full-length collections Six Months’ Rent (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1991), Pregnant Poems (Black Moss Press, 1994), Into the Peculiar Dark (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998) and The Exit Show (Kingsville ON: Palimpsest Press, 2003), as well as the chapbook when the light of any action ceases (Georgetown KY: Finishing Line Press, 2016).

The structure of a suite of “100-word prose poems” are an intriguing constraint, sixty-four poems grouped together into four sections: “The Train to Water,” “Hometown Return,” “Kaleidoscope Box,” and “Demeter’s Country.” Set as a loose travelogue through and between Toronto and San Francisco, the book exists geographically, even culturally, between these two distinct poles, set not as a linear straight line between the two, but almost offering the two locations where the author had lived to where she currently lived as a kind of counterpoint. “Knowing it has something to do with me,” she writes, to open the second of a run of nine self-contained poems, each titled “Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” “locked in the narrative. When he turns to me a sun shines. Dusk falls when he turns away. I disappear into a Pavlovian dark: a mouth of childhood swallowing me whole.” This is a book of memory, perhaps, across a suite of prose poems, offering points along the grid of her life. She writes experiences within each period, each place, with sidebar considerations in a cluster of “@Fifteen” poems that write of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, or working as a hostess “at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff,” for example. As that particular poem writes:

Just then leaving the hostess gig at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff after I’d been fired. On those mountain roads, the clarity of sunlight and clear mountain air. That breath where I just felt somehow a fleetly neurtral truth that I was still a child, and that I should not be out on the highway. With my thumb stuck out. that all my bravado was false. There isn’t as much narrative to that memory. A moment like the morning light on a truck and the crisp shadow it casts. The moment moved by me, and I kept hurtling forward.

The poems sit curiously between a narrative of unseen beginnings and overt conclusion, writing stealth and wisdom across quiet narratives of movement. The narrative impulse is somewhere in the realm of Lydia Davis fictions or the prose poems of Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected here], presenting a prose lyric rich in layerings and imagery, straightforward paths and hints of what may exist beyond the boundaries of each page. “An unease of ocean, large waves,” begins “Red Rock Beach,” “and of undertow pulling out to sea. Close to our towel the young slender couple dances half-dressed to invisible music. The wide ocean opens its wide mouth and waits.”