Heikki Huotari

Heikki Huotari's poems oscillate between intense moments of scientific clarity and absurdist pirouettes that remind us that, while the "world" may be a dance of entropic chaos screened by a thin veneer of rational apology, the universe is largely a laughing matter.His work is absolute proof that Surrealism is not dead.

The poems in Acceleration Due to Gravity are lyrically ekphrastic, consistently disyllabic, breathlessly defamiliarizing, bombastically assertive and speciously inferential. Huotari focuses locally on sonic templates and globally on the structure of logical proofs. For rhetoric and timing, he borrows heavily from the structures of fire-and-brimstone preaching and stand-up comedy."Like a cabinet of curiosities, each of Heikki Huotari's poems contains an arrangement to surprise and delight. With an ear for sound and an eye for multiple facets, Huotari links mathematical, literary, and cultural ideas, turning recognizable phrases on their heads, creating gemlike puzzles, nesting dolls of humor and wonder."-Alisa Golden, editor of Star 82 Review"Here, with unfailing irony...we have the Marriage of Physics and Poetry, of elementary particles with elementary joy."-Isabel Nirenberg, co-editor of Offcourse "Heikki Huotari collects gyroscopes, antipodes, oscilloscopes, hoofbeats, centipedes, cosmonauts, and Visigoths. He] makes a poetry of stuff. T. S. Eliot could connect / Nothing with nothing but Huotari connects everything with everything. He detects odd, discarded parts along the sand and hoards them into castles. Oh, the ideas you'll eye as you root through the holy junk drawer "-Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, editor of SORTES

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics based in San Rafael, California. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, Spillway, and Willow Springs. His latest collections are When Correlation Is Causation (Better than Starbucks Press, 2022), The Knowable Emotions (Lynx House Press, 2019), and Truth Table (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He won the 2016 Gambling the Aisle poetry chapbook prize and the 2020 Star 82 Press Book Award. This chapbook won James Tate Poetry Prize 2022.

With an ear for sound, Heikki Huotari turns clich s on their heads, playfully mixing scientific language with everyday phrases and heartfelt emotion. This is a mind-expanding collection of prose poems at once sober, humorous, and surreal. With color cover art paintings, and black and white drawings and drypoints by Kay Bradner.