‘In Leigh Kotsilidis’s Some of Us May Live, the disconsolate song of the proverbial canary in the mineshaft is revitalized by the boisterous anthropomorphic voices of fox, wolf, and bear, with grace notes of glaciers and black holes. Even suffused as they are with an awareness of imminent ecological collapse and of End Times looming (maybe), Kotsilidis’s poems are infused with wonder, music, and humour. These poems map small miracles, full of animal sense and empathy, “Be the ant / Become the spore” they implore.’ – Sylvia Legris, author of The Principle of Rapid Peering 

‘Some of Us May Live engages with the signs of our richly troubled times with poems that are at once deeply serious and – how does Leigh Kotsilidis manage this? – playful. With fine-grained irony, insight, and wit, but without ever losing the bite of wonder at ecological interconnections, she documents our passage as “we wade at the edge / of what is beyond us.” These poems give voice to the textures of current existence: a collection to treasure for its acuity and lightly worn wisdom.’ – Don McKay, author of Lurch

‘Some of Us May Live seduces with its stunning epistemic raptures. Leigh Kotsilidis delivers an astonishing détournement of our scientific desires to know ourselves and the gorgeous universe in which we live. Here, humanized animals – Wolf, Bear, and Fox – collude with the everyday to reveal and revel in new patterns and formations of thought in the Anthropocene’s many catastrophes. With bold minimalism, Kotsilidis asks us to “wade at the edge / of what is beyond us” whether it is the “knowable loss” of death, zombifying parasites, or the neuro- and genetic networks that make each of us porous with meaning. Some of Us May Live bursts with scientific lyricism, insightful schisms, and sensuous data. Without a doubt, Kotsilidis has unmasked herself as a[n] [r]evolutionary poet. This collection is as vital a read for science communicators as it is for ecopoets, knowledge workers, and dreamers who seek new epistemic breaks to re-rupture, re-envision, and re-imagine our ecological condition.’ – Orchid Tierney, author of This Abattoir is a College

‘There’s a beautiful recklessness in the combination Leigh Kotsilidis imagines, careful invitations in the sounds and shapeliness that let understanding not be reduced or distorted. These poems wrangle with the vocabularies of explanation, pronouncement, commerce, argument, and fact, allowing them, more often than not, to self-destruct, so that we can glimpse in the rubble and wreckage and aftershocks something we are not always in a position to remember.’ – Dara Barrois/Dixon (Dara Wier), author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

‘Some of Us May Live by Leigh Kotsilidis radically expands the call of ecopoetics to include the domain of cosmological wilderness. Reinterpreting scientific understanding, human experience, and animal behavior through an investigative poetics, Kotsilidis unearths the indeterminacy of reality from lockdown. Speculative, witty, lyrical, and elegiac, these pressurized poems vibrate at the event horizon of life and death, bringing into focus ethical and philosophical tensions between humanity’s apocalyptic effects on nature and scientific knowledge that requires us to imagine the unimaginable. Kotsilidis sees what otherwise cannot be seen: an expanding universe accelerating toward environmental, political, and cultural catastrophe on Earth.’ – Amy Catanzano, author of The Imaginary Present: Essays in Quantum Poetics

‘In this wise, opulent mashup of vocabularies, Leigh Kotsilidis summons Bear, Wolf – alongside many other kinds of living beings – and neural networks to tell her stories. The result is a beautifully readable set of questions about life suspended on the edge of the abyss. Enter her world of omnivorous curiosity.’ – Eleanor Wachtel, author of Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields

Praise for Hypotheticals:

‘[Hypotheticals] seems to represent the best – which is to say, the smartest – in a new kind of poetry, steeped in science, relentlessly questioning its foundation (examination of the spine is a recurrent trope) and hardly concerned about where that leaves poetic tradition. Hypotheticals proposes a new look at the world in a brave poetic voice.’ – American Scientist

‘[An] excellent debut collection ... By speaking of hypotheticals, instead of hypotheses, [Kotsilidis] implies that she will do more than explain the facts: she will imagine them.’ – Montreal Review of Books

‘Kotsidilis is not just tossing around polemics against science, or defining Man as the being that deceives himself in believing that he is not deceived. Her best poems wield images to reshape perception itself.’ – The Rover

Leigh Kotsilidis is a poet and intermedia artist. This is her second book of poetry with Coach House Books. She lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal.