Alexander Hollenberg's Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos

"by which I mean something always escapes"

In my cantankerous fashion I’ve a vast dislike for a style of poetry I call the “verbal fruitcake,” stuffed chock full of “interesting” vocabulary words to dubious aesthetic effect. As a reader I’ve seen enough of words like “murmuration” and “petrichor” and “deliquescence” to last me a lifetime. Gertrude Stein famously said to Ernest Hemingway, “Remarks are not literature,” and I would add that “a spelling bee is not poetry.” And yet. In reading as in matters of the heart, you don’t always know what you like until you see it. There’s a good chance you’ll come across something, someday, that busts up all your dealbreakers.

Alexander Hollenberg’s recent poetry collection Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos is simply studded with gobstopper words like “syzygy” and “marcescent” and “strabismic” and “somnambule.” Here’s a bit of this in context, from the first part of the first poem in the book:

The crow’s wing is a blade
slicing the ocean open.

Inside, the usual offal—bird’s nests
of old transatlantic cable, fists of seagrass

that clasp and conceal the bleached bones
of tankers and trawl nets, dusky shards of fallen stars

set down on the seabed in a sunken syzygy
of celestial trash—a drowned, stationary orbit.

Even deeper in abyssalpelagic space, a forest
of grey spruce slow-dances

in the dark undercurrent, like phosphenes
forged by the pressure of water and salt.

Why do I not hate this? How is he doing this so elegantly and so well?

For one thing, Hollenberg is perfectly capable of writing a simple, straightforward sentence like “The crow’s wing is a blade / slicing the ocean open.” Or, later in the book, something like “Tim and Steve taught me how to save. / We lined up pennies / on the train tracks / like copper soldiers / abandoned ….” As readers, we do get breaks where we can just chill out and let Hollenberg tell us a little story.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, Hollenberg has a whole theory of language which he’s demonstrating here. He isn’t throwing in the multisyllabic obscurities just to show off, or to sound “poetic.” Repeatedly he queries whether our use of language (and its figurative devices like metaphor) distorts the world it purports to illuminate. My brother, I feel you. This is one of my main worries in life. (And I say this as one who’s had her share of more obvious worries, but if we don’t grapple with the nature of reality itself then how can we hope to make sense of our own private pain?)

In the poem “Exile Happens as Soon as You Speak,” Hollenberg notes, “I cannot understand the fact of the moon / in the morning and so I make it mean / something beyond itself ….” After exploring a few shades and shifts of meaning, he concludes: “… maybe the moon / is a hawk and maybe it’s the garden / and maybe exile happens as soon as you speak / and maybe making the world paratactic / at least allows for the possibility / that human story will not consume the cosmos.”

Well. One can hope. On a bit of a different topic, but one more thing I really want to mention—speaking here as someone who’s long nurtured a seething antipathy toward English-language haiku, I greatly enjoyed Hollenberg’s poem titled “National Haiku Day,” consisting of ten not-quite-haiku-like three-line stanzas in which he declares his incapacity for brevity and his love of the word “and”—“because it can put two guys together / so smoothly and // that’s the start of something.”

Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos is Alexander Hollenberg’s first book. Here’s hoping it’s just the start of something. With such a stunning opener, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Publication details

Author: Alexander Hollenberg

Title: Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos

Publisher: Gaspereau Press

Year: 2025