Acceleration Due to Gravity

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 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.