Alan Sokal, the physicist who famously “debunked” a Cultural Studies journal by tricking its editors into publishing a finely crafted parody, threw down the following glove to his wishy-washy colleagues in the humanities: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

Sokal’s no-nonsense approach to postmodernist theory is on one side of the Great Divide between the sciences and the humanities. On the other, many continue to beat the postmodernist drum (though none seem to have braved Sokal’s gravity test). In her first volume of poetry, Hypotheticals, Leigh Kotsilidis is one of those drummers.

A graphic artist by training and trade, Kotsilidis is a visual poet. Her poems are descriptive rather than introspective, building complex images that must be unpacked on two levels: What are we seeing, and How are we seeing it? Each line dramatizes the positions of both perceiving subjects and perceived objects. In some cases, the object returns with a faint objection: “You are falsifying me!”

In this collection, a forest declaims Man’s “growing cabinet / of atrocities,” lamenting the way that “He counts our apples as he would / the dead: each one a head.” Here, Kotsilidis gives explicit voice to the implicit suffering of Nature. Elsewhere, knowledge’s falsification of its objects is only obliquely apparent. The speaker of “Sound Check” performs a morcellement scientifique—a clinical decomposition—that almost obscures his patient’s own intentions.

While you visualize her

underlying anatomy’s symmetry,

confirm her trachea

is midline. Put thumbs together

at her spine: Breathe.

…

Don’t let her fool you with coy

notes, lewd bassoons, buoyant

plumes, booze, croak.

Relentlessly objective, the sexless physician turns a blind eye to his patient’s enticements, her gibes and her fun. He methodically ignores the signals of her coital ambitions.

Because many of its poems elicit Nature’s response to the pretensions of Man – to invoke a classic dichotomy - Hypotheticals will be read by some as an eco-critical project. For others, it will reek of postmodernist dogmatism, irrationalist skepticism of science, and an unfortunate preoccupation with the problem of language. The book makes no secret of its agenda. The back jacket reads: “While science has provided a useful metaphor to explain the world, it has just as often proved to be as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it.” Aggressive with this thesis, Hypotheticals throws around combative rhetoricals such as: “which truth will the brain feign?”

But at her strongest, Kotsidilis is not just tossing around polemics, or defining Man as the being that deceives himself in believing he is not deceived. Her best poems wield images to reshape perception itself. With sly metaphors, they scheme to make language realize its own limits, seizing neglected aspects of once-familiar objects. Of the ocean floor pierced by an oil rig’s vampiric drills, she writes that it is “a man, his mouth a clam / shucked of sound.”  Objects of nature transfigure into signs of human significance: a backhoe’s orange arm slipping its shovel into the topsoil makes “You think of her dress – / your hand in the hem.” These images, with their instantaneous clarity, bypass the scientific method. With poetry, Kotsilidis wants to decompose the world and remake it from scratch.

The poems in Hypotheticals are deft rather than dogmatic, and the book manages to surprise with pieces whose relation to the theme are not immediately clear. It particularly avoids the naïve anthropomorphism of pathetic fallacy. Here, Nature is not the echo of Man’s aches and yearnings, but a force that batters Man with its more fundamental truth. Because of its abstract subject matter, Hypotheticals may be destined for a small cadre of enthusiastic speculators. But at the edge of the universe, these few keen voyeurs will eagerly clamp open their eyelids as Leigh peels knowledge’s dress over its head.

When he’s is not selling books, Matthias Lalisse is writing about them. He currently lives in Montreal.

Tagged as: BOOKS, Coach House Press, cultural studies, Hypotheticals, Leigh Kotsilidis, poetry, postmodernism, Rover