Bøker av Heikki Huotari

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.

Each of the poems in When Correlation is Causation is a framing, celebration or random cancellation of the events of the preceding 24 hours, often as a slant scientific proof or spontaneous statistical analysis, with appropriate attention paid to the theater of the absurd, to stand-up comedy, to mourning for hire, to throwing elbows at kitchen sinks and to many a source of fortune and their lapdog. On the other hand, each poem is an experiment: a new half-life crisis every day, a barely recognizable sports car, so wants to be seen as something new and different. The title of the volume is, as are many of the poems, intended to recognize the ability of a metaphor to induce change, e.g., if eating ice cream is correlated with sunburn then eating ice cream leads to being abducted by aliens. The author learned in graduate school that, as does the zero vector, any symbol worth its salt will point with equal enthusiasm in all directions. What it's all about is either Alfie or the Hokey Pokey and the lyric poet doesn't presume to choose, but they cordially invite you to. A sentence from one of the poems presents this invitation as an opportunity: "The path of least resistance far from fixed, what this continuum is missing is concurrent birdsong."This collection of 79 experimental poems uses language as a form of dance, taking us into realms of wonder.

Heikki Huotari attended the graduate writing program at the University of Massachusetts for one year and then went on to a doctorate in mathematics. He became a professor and held down a corner of the ¿study of statistical inference and the shape of the related metric spaces.¿ Upon retirement from academia in 2012, he went straight back to poetry. His books include Tooth and Shoe and Fractal Idyll.