Leesa Dean, Interstitial

The latest by Krestova, British Columbia writer, educator and mentor Leesa Dean, following the short story collection Waiting for the Cyclone (Brindle & Glass, 2016) and a novella in verse, The Filling Station (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022), as well as a couple of chapbooks, is the poetry collection Interstitial (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026), one of a trio of recently-released collections by this new iteration of the legendary Canadian small press. Composed as a lyric of detail, both meticulous and sketched, and incorporating visual elements, Dean quilts her Interstitial with incredible precision across five numbered sections—“I. APOGEE,” “II. TRAPPINGS,” “III. THE DEEPEST KIND OF LISTENING,” “IV. INTERSTITIAL” and “V. PERIGREE”—all wrapped around the illness, loss and aftermath of her late mother. “She’s not your mother anymore,” she writes, to open the short sequence “Brace Yourself,” “my father warned as the hospital doors / flung open to reveal her final ecosystem [.]” At times, she writes her descriptions slant, confronting directly when required and skimming across an interiority, an abstract of lyric, as counterpoint, holding a fine balance between what needs to be said and what can’t be easily held. “I inherited my wildness / from the midnight sun / long,” begins the poem “L’appel du vide,” to open the second section, “lean days in a resource town / where greasy oolichan flashed / beneath the wide-toothed Skeena [.]”

I’m curious as to how a number of her poems throughout sit as block text, as though utilizing a physical constraint on her lines, almost as a kind of containment to push against that very sense of wild, or even to keep certain poems, through the rawness of her subject matter, from falling apart entirely. “She cried the first three months. latched / while sobbing.” begins the short lyric “Firecracker,” “mouth as big as her soul. / woke every hour. didn’t want to miss a / thing. I watched her every move. don’t / fuck up—not sure who I meant. two / years sober then. Still white-knuckling, / saying you saved me baby girl. how do we / quantify our saviors.” The poems of Interstitial directly confront the loss and the aftermath of her mother, the grief of a family, and family secrets that always have a way of making themselves known. It is a book of and around loss, but one of connections made, seeking to unpack and articulate details of her mother’s experience; working to solidify through writing what otherwise might have slipped entirely away. To make solid, and therefore more present, that loss, perhaps, working to unpack threads and speculations around her mother’s direct experience, as the poem “Learning to Walk,” for example, offers: “My mother is released at eighteen / months. She has lived most of her life / in hospital.” It is through Intertidal that Dean allows her mother her own agency, one that wasn’t always present, possible or even acknowledged by those around her, such as she writes as part of the extended sequence “Cripple,” that includes:

What nagymama didn’t say when she betrayed your secrets
is that you survived. You grew and thrived, became a nurse
for sick children and then had two children. The doctors
labelled your body an unfit vessel for childbearing—there
was nothing you enjoyed more than proving people
wrong. This is a trait I have inherited.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robin Durnford

Robin Durnford was born in St. John's Newfoundland and grew up on the west coast of the island. She is the author of five books of poetry, including A Lovely Gutting (2012), Fog of the Outport (2013), Half Rock (2016), Gaptoothed (2020), and most recently, At Beckett's Grave (2025). She currently lives in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) where she teaches poetry and memoir at John Abbott College. She is currently working on a poetry collection called Aspirations for my Enemy and a novel called Thaw.

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

A Lovely Gutting (McGill-Queen’s 2012) changed my life in a myriad of ways. It came out six months after my son was born (there’s a photo of him somewhere in his baby swing with a copy placed somewhat inappropriately in his lap for PR purposes). This was a couple of months after I had taken up my first academic post at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University and a year after I had eloped to Savannah, Georgia with my husband. In that very small part of the world—western Newfoundland—it made a bit of a splash. We had a fancy launch with so many people we had to change venues at the last minute. I went on tour. We sent the book to Seamus Heaney on the Strand in Dublin (this was just a year before he died) and he immediately wrote back to me with some encouraging and now very precious words. I felt like I had the world by the tail and in a way I did. I had finally published a book—a book of poetry no less.

At Beckett’s Grave (McGill-Queen’s 2025) came thirteen years and four books later. I now live in Montreal. People are still getting to know me here, to know my story, but I feel like in some ways the release of Beckett’s Grave is even more special. This time my teenage son could actually come to the intimate launch I had with friends, true believers, and poetry lovers at Librairie Pulp Books & Café in Verdun. I felt at home. I realized on that night that poetry has become my home.

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

The story I always tell is about doing poetry readings into a hairbrush like a pop star as I read out loud from the old Norton Anthology that had been lying around the house since I was a child or my mom finding bits of poetry on scraps of paper around my bedroom—or under the bed or under the pillow or in a shoe—after some boy broke up with me when I was a teenager. But the real story (although these other stories are also true) is a little more tragic. My dad died suddenly one day in 2004. I started working through the trauma rather poetically in a notebook I kept with me all that first summer on the island after he died. This became the basis for my first book, but I threw out the first 100 poems. It took that long for me to start writing anything good—poems that anyone else would want to read. My first ‘publication’ was some lines I wrote for my father’s grave:

Once again you dwell beneath the waves/
On the other side of surfaces we hear you laughing still…

(These words now form the inscription for a memoir I have written called Breach: A Story of Grief in Five Whales.)

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?

My process has changed a lot over the years, but then in some ways it hasn’t changed at all. I usually start with an idea for a book—a controlling metaphor or emotional current, if you will, and go from there. With A Lovely Gutting, the metaphor was—rather stereotypically—fish, specifically the gutted fish; Half Rock (Gaspereau 2016) was into ideas of cleavage, hybridity, and mixedness of identity as I played with the image of the sedimentary rock I grew up with and became fascinated by; the fog of grief in Fog of the Outport (Jackpine 2013); the gaps in time and identity as I worked through my relationship with my own gap tooth in Gaptoothed (Gaspereau 2020); and Beckett’s existentialism and my rather foolishly getting lost trying to find his grave at a cemetery in Paris for At Beckett’s Grave.

My one rule is that I never stick too tightly to the focus and even let myself wander off a bit because I never want the poetry to feel contrived or forced. For it to work, for me, the metaphor should emerge naturally from my life as helpful and poignant in some way—as a spine for the collection rather than a cudgel.

In general, I write discreet poetic drafts that I call little poetic slabs that I then carve and sculpt and refine into shape. I’ve gotten better and better at it over the years, and I find these days the poems sometimes come nearly fully formed, but I also think it feels that way because I trust myself more. I know what I am looking for, and I am better at recognizing a poem when it comes.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

A poem usually begins with… honestly? I have no idea. An emotion. An image. A trace of memory. A voice. It can be anything. I just sit within my own quietness, if I can get it, and see what comes up. Sometimes a spark will come from reading. Certain poets and writers can be quite generative for me, others not so much. It feels a bit random.

The answer to the second part of this question is both: I start with short pieces that I stitch together into a book, but I usually end up throwing a bunch away in a reality TV show-like elimination game of poetry survivor.

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

I love doing readings. From the very beginning I loved reading poetry to an audience and can’t get enough of it really. I would read to one person or a room of thousands. I just love the sound of words and the way words make music on the tongue, and I think I am good at this very elemental thing—connecting humans to the vital sound of words rolling or roaring off the page. I also love hearing other poets read whether it be my friends in Montreal or recordings of Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney. For some reason I think it’s very important that humans get up to this—especially now.

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?

I think the theoretical concern behind my poetry these days is to have no theoretical concerns—to let the poems feel and to help others feel what it means to be human and alive and complicated and lovely, to really speak to and connect to other humans in a way that lets them know it’s okay—it’s okay to be us and to not know and to just experience ourselves and the world as it is—not as you are told things ‘should’ be. (I have rather pretentiously thought of this recent stance of mine—this letting go—as a sort of New Humanism).

On the other hand, I started out with a lot of theoretical ‘chips’ on my shoulder—class, marginalized linguistic identity (in terms of my Newfoundland accent/dialect), feminism, giving voice to grief and trauma at a time (twenty years ago) when Canadians seemed scared of being real about all that.

I still feel strongly about the Newfoundland accent. I want to be able to read and write in my own distinctive voice. I feel that my voice should not be flattened into Canadian conformity and blandness either (as I was pressured to do early in my career). I feel the vibrancy of the accent can sometimes make the poems come alive on and off the page, and this should be celebrated.

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?

At Banff in 2025 I was lucky enough to workshop a new prose manuscript (a memoir called Breach) with the incredible Omar El Akkad (American War; One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This). I admire him so much and the way he carries himself as a writer in the world. He tells the truth as he sees it. He responds passionately to the moment even at some risk to himself. I want to follow that model in my own small way. This is nothing new, of course, but I think writers should be truth-tellers. Anti-propagandists, if you will. I think they should be on the side of the human—the ordinary human against the powerful systems that oppress and harm them, the forces of violence, etc. I teach Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis every year and I have thought of that book every day since the Iran War started. Her little human story is the story of that whole country now—and I grieved for her on the first day when the girl’s school got bombed in Minab.

It’s our job to be human, to remind people what it means to be human, to express that humanity, to tell stories, turn emotions into words that can be articulated and responded to.

This is crucial work in the world. It is more crucial than ever right now.

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

I love editors. I wish there were more of them and they got paid better. I think writers NEED editors especially now. Yes, I love working with editors especially when they share your vision and believe in your work. I had only one bad experience with an editor, and I think it was because they didn’t share my vision. They wanted to make my work more ‘accessible’ which is a word I actually hate (when it comes to writing) and there aren’t many words I hate.

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

The best piece of advice I’ve ever heard as a writer comes from Seamus Heaney: Don’t listen to anybody who has not produced good work. The second piece of advice comes from Doris Lessing: The conditions for writing will always be impossible (so don’t let that stop you). And the third piece of advice comes from me (she says arrogantly): Even when it comes to our precious writing—and we can be precious about it!—actual humans come first but so does the truth, and that’s a delicate balance sometimes. Also, be nice. There’s really no need to be a dick in this life. (Another piece of advice was said to me directly from the former poet laureate of Wales: There are assholes everywhere.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It is pretty easy for me although almost everything comes out first (or best) as poetry. Still, I started out as a journalist. I come from a storytelling culture. Sometimes you just have to tell the story.

That’s what happened to me a few years ago. I got a little tired of ‘telling my story’ in fragments or bits and pieces of poetry and just wanted the whole narrative laid out there plainly for everyone to see: death of my father, ‘scandalous’ marriage, birth of my son, becoming a poet and this became Breach (see above), a work of creative non-fiction. I’m working on a novel now (called Thaw) that goes over some of the same events but from a different angle.

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

These days I can’t keep much of a routine as I work full-time at the college (John Abbott College in Montreal). I am one of those people, I’m afraid, who people make fun of for getting up a 5 am, but I have to. I live on the Plateau Mont Royal, so I feel the need to get up before the city does in order to get some quiet and even then! I try to get between one and four hours of writing time in during the mornings depending on my schedule and the day and who needs what and when. It doesn’t always work. I often work weekends to make up for lost time during the week. I barely ever work in the evenings because I am too tired and my brain generally stops functioning after supper. I got my work ethic from my late father who grew up in poverty, had three kids, and built a business from the ground up.

The typical day begins with coffee—exactly three cups—and going over my schedule and then a poem or two and some sort of lefty political podcast.

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

When my writing gets stalled, I return to my desk or notebook and keep going. I re-read, I remember, I try not to judge (oh, but I judge), I try to believe if a book is supposed to be it will be. I follow my intuition, annoying I know, but if a project is really stuck, I just move on to a new project at least for a while and hope for the best. I often have multiple projects going at once. Reading also helps.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cedar. I grew up in a cedar house. Plaster and glue. My father was a prosthetist and built legs for people. The sea.

14 - 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?

All of the above really, with perhaps some particular affection for visual art. I’ve collaborated with visual artists, dancers, and musicians and I love it. I would also add fashion and gossip. Yellow journalism. Tabloids. Scandal.

Also: the ocean and its rhythms + moods—mainly the North Atlantic but also the Pacific; whales, fish, lately cats. Glenn Gould.

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

Some poems come to mind: Sylvia Plath’s “Point Shirley”; Seamus Heaney’s “Mossbawn: Sunlight” and “Casualty”; Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” Frank O’Hara’s “Having aCoke with You” (the most romantic poem ever written); and Dylan Thomas’s, “In my craft or sullen art.” Louise Glück’s collected works. e.e. cummings’s “my father moved through dooms of love.” Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (this is a novel) and Traplines (short stories). Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Shawl” (this one is actually magic). Marilyn Dumont’s “The Devil’s Language.” The Picture of Dorian Gray because it still feels dangerous. Anything by Louise Bernice Halfe. Mahmoud Darwish. The careers of Michael Crummey and Lisa Moore and Mary Dalton (bless them). Omar El Akkad. Danez Smith. Octavia Butler. Salman Rushdie. James Baldwin. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Ursula K LeGuin. Haruki Murakami. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Kafka. Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Joyce. Freud. Lacan. The psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster (On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe). Now looking into Bachelard (The Psychoanalysis of Fire).

And well, my last collection of poetry was an homage to Samuel Beckett, so definitely that wonderful anti-fascist Samuel Beckett.

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

Travel to the middle east (as we say in the west). One day, hopefully soon (I’m a little too chicken right now), when the dust settles and the world is different, I would like to go to Egypt and do the tourist thing. I want to take my son to the pyramids as I promised him when he was little, but I would also like to travel beyond that. Anywhere it’s safe. Oman. I would definitely like to see Oman. I would like to go to Japan and sing karaoke with my brother-in-law who has lived there for decades. I would like to attend a fancy ball (maybe a fancy writer’s prize!) in a designer dress. I would like to go to the islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon (and maybe the Îles de la Madeleine and Anticosti Island) and visit the Torngat Mountains in Labrador. I would like to do a poetry reading in the cathedral at the very top of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. I would like to own a corgi, a dachshund, or an Irish setter. I would like to go to Jean Talon market and buy flowers with a toy dog in my purse.

17 - 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?

It says in my high school yearbook that I wanted to be a war correspondent, so I’ll go with that.

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

Boring answer: I had to. There was no something else for me. I am obsessed and have been obsessed with the written word my entire life except for a brief moment when I was a teenager and became obsessed with boys.

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

Books: Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; Lucy Grealy’s amazing Autobiography of a Face

Film: No Other Land

20 - What are you currently working on?

As mentioned, a novel called Thaw: The Unfreezing of a Family in which three siblings look back on the traumatic death of their father—and the image of their living father—with different eyes. The story starts with a family crisis that brings them together rather reluctantly. In this horrible moment, they finally realize that healing will only come when they melt the freeze that has come between them in order to put a coherent story together that will help them make their peace with each other, with the family, with their father.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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;

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.”