Poetry. '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