Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 114
- Language: English
- Date Published: October, 2017
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-83-9
Praise
Stephanie Erdman’s dazzling turns of thought, held by metaphor’s gravitational pull, form a singularly memorable lyric voice. Remarkably daring, Erdman proffers within the world’s sensorium a hidden existence—and we glimpse its beauty. Let her be your guide. She never loses her nerve. —Burt Kimmelman
“Pyrrhonic,” the term, comes from skeptical philosophy, and as a unifying title for this collection, it sets a welcome and helpful frame. The poems in Stephanie Erdman’s Pyrrhonic range from bourbon and barbeque grills to the expectations and failures of modernity with a clear imagistic focus on the tangible, setting up oppositions that, rather than argue, deepen both. “[W]hile I try to scrub off my skin / the physicists theorize elegantly” she writes in an early poem, and this economy of oppositions (personal, scientific, metaphysical) buzzes through Pyrrhonic from Buddha to Kant to biological science and Ambien, in the form of lyric poems, erasure poems, found texts, and formal poetry, which illustrate and underscore Erdman’s exploration of the pyrrhonic nature of provisional and new meaning in the face of received beliefs, texts, and forms. It’s this act of Pyrrhonic’s skepticism that is its most profound, where it builds through questioning (“I would talk about the moon / but to what end?” she writes). It’s an admirable and open-eyed journey I’m glad to join. —John Gallaher
Excerpt
Celebrating what I forgot
The sky scraping
against itself
in steel wool surging
toward making it
rain today, we
apply ourselves,
indigently, to neat
bourbons. This is how
we celebrate
the South and count
down toward the julep
months, our muddlers
in our mouths
and not speaking to one another.
I don’t fold up
elegantly anymore,
expansive with age
and weariness,
cotton-tongued
at one a.m.
in the basket of your grown-up
tricycle.
Author
Stephanie Erdman studied at Purdue University and received her master’s degree through Indiana University. Pyrrhonic is her first full-length publication but her work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine and Twyckenham Notes. Stephanie lives in Southwest Michigan and works as a professor of English and as a vacuum cleaner technician.