??For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis''s lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions the linguistic roots of the hypothetical, both as they apply to the Scientific Method and its faith in certainty, and to the word''s alternate meaning, as something that is merely ''supposed to be true,'' and often, over time, is proved false. Under the poet''s wide-angled, open-hearted, open-minded gaze, scientific method slowly begins to mirror the dark art of poetry, reinforcing what we believe about ourselves and the world one minute, then abruptly throwing everything into question: ''At the heart of all matter/ is a single immutable point/ Listen, climb in, I''ll show you/ what I mean by rock.'' ''[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 ''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 Wier