Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live

  

SCIENTIFIC PREDICTABILITY

Wolf believes science
can predict his fate 

As if distant phenomena
will tell him something pivotal: 

whether he’ll get the perfect job,
the exact moment she’ll pull away. 

He waits for specific parts of his brain to light up.
Listens for imperilled croaks in the night – 

Odobenus rosmarus, walrus, horse-whale,
shore giant, tooth-walking sea cow. 

Bear, too, sits heavy in his thoughts.
Bats hang on like heartbeats.. 

Clouds snag on mountain peaks.
Trees contort, palsy. 

Out there, in verity,
catastrophe.

The second full-length collection from Montreal-based poet and intermedia artist Leigh Kotsilidis, following Hypotheticals (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Some of Us May Live (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection some fifteen years, one might reason, in the making. I’m intrigued by the steady punch of Kotsilidis’ sharp and short-lined lyric sketchworks, offering accumulating phrases that thread together to form narrative shapes. Just listen to the opening of the three-page poem “FIRST PRINCIPLES,” that begins: “A theory exists / for each of us. // To stop motion, / something heavier must intervene. // There is nothing / that won’t crush you. // The more you suffer, / the more you remember. // A crisis churns / out opportunity. // Fame promises fun / until someone ODs. // We pay heed / only to what is useful.” Kotsilidis’ narrative shapes nearly form rings, from the phrase and the sentence to the poem, and into the collection itself, a book-length single moment of perpetual clarity. One might say that the sentences and phrases of Hypotheticals extend and interplay with an ongoingness, almost as a book-length line, broken up into line breaks and individual poems, run almost continuous from the first page to the last. Or, as the poem “WHAT WE CAN’T SEE” begins: “We wade at the edge / of what is beyond us // There is nothing more / than delusion // Men mistake porch bulbs / for moons // A body drifts indeterminately / unnoticed // Every body leaves / over time [.]”

At nearly one hundred and thirty pages (albeit with thirty pages of endnotes, perhaps the most I’ve seen for an individual poetry title), there’s a heft to this collection, and a shift in an ecopoetic from focusing the impact of climate crisis upon the landscape to that of the world’s inhabitants, offering a kind of bestiary, one comparable to Vancouver poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s own full-length poetry debut from the same publisher, The Animal in the Room (2023) [see my review of such here]. “How / to communicate that / which has no name // or why a name said / again and again and again / dissipates.” she writes, to close the short poem “SUBLIMATION,” “Lying / among such incessancy / our bodies // concede; / a thousand bees / devour us irretrievably.” Kotsilidis’ clear-eyed interiorities ripple across the lyric, the landscape, attempting to articulate the question of how one is able to live amid such self-created crises. “We raise stone / and concrete edifices. / The only sounds between walls / the ones we create.” she writes, as part of “SCALE PROBLEM,” “We dismiss birds that signal / heavy weather. / Wait out high winds / threatening the next resonance disaster.” From stardust to oceans, suburbia to glaciers, selfies to snow fences, the scale of these accumulated poems, these questions, observations and life-lessons, is enormously rich, varied and complex, managing to encapsulate everything there is and might be, fully aware it can never be contained. Or, as the three-page “ANIMAL SENSE” closes:

A roach without its head
can live for weeks 

You must flirt, be funny,
buy her a couple of drinks 

Naming a dead celestial body
after one date, don’t 

Too much stimuli
will trigger fight, or flight 

You can lead a horse
down any road 

But if you tell the horse
how to be a horse, it will buck 

You can’t keep snakes
and expect them to bite only the neighbour 

Be the ant
Become the spore