Acceleration Due to Gravity

by Heikki Huotari

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.

Early Praise for Acceleration Due to Gravity:

Here, with unfailing irony, for those readers whose education is not strictly professionalized, we have the Marriage of Physics and Poetry, of elementary particles with elementary joy.

—Isabel Nirenberg, co-editor of  Offcourse

What is going on in here?

Heikki Huotari collects gyroscopes, antipodes, oscilloscopes, hoofbeats, centipedes, cosmonauts, and Visigoths. So much molecular subatomic frizz! Is it my imagination or do you taste an ozone twang of old electronics? Poorly insulated?

Huotari makes a poetry of stuff. T. S. Eliot could “connect / Nothing with nothing” but Huotari connects everything with everything. Holistic Huotari detects odd, discarded parts along the sand and hoards them into castles.

And for laggers who want quotable brilliance, you’ll find plenty profundity. Oh, the ideas you’ll eye as you root through the holy junk drawer! You’ll get metaphysics via physics. But it swings. The hip bone’s connected to the hep bone: “What happens in Las Vegas happens in Los Angeles and even on Galapagos.”

My poetry professor once dared us to write randomness. “Hard, isn’t it?” because thoughts want to cohere. Huotari’s Rube Goldbergs are tightly wired. Conveyors move you from knowing to not knowing and back again, for the first time.

Do not motor through these poems. Fifty-eight poems makes fifty-eight days’ reading. Grind them gradually. Ground yourself.

—Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, editor of Sortes

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

About the Author

Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He has worked as a farm hand, a forest-fire fighter, a letter carrier and a professor. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book and two chapbook prizes. His Erdős number is two.

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