When Correlation is Causation
When Correlation is Causation
80 experimental poems by Heikki Huotari
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6” x 9” 105 pages
$15.00
This collection of 80 experimental poems frequently looks through a prism of terms and concepts taken from mathematics and physics. The words dance to an otherworldly melody, and when the music ends one is left with questions and observations about life which are often startling. Heikki Huotari’s poems follow no drummer. A thrilling adventure for lovers of experimental poetry.
Reviews:
It seems that Heikki Huotari’s poetry knows no boundaries. I come across poems that remind me of those old Rube Goldberg contraptions. Others have a keen intimacy with nature like the illustrations in Sibley’s bird guides. A poem of Huotari’s can seem to lead me on a wild goose chase with no purpose other than to confuse me, then, pow, a line slams into my heart and puts me deeply in touch with myself and my place in the universe, whether either exists or not. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Descartes!
—Stefanie Marlis, author of Slow Joy.
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 laughing matter.” His work is absolute proof that Surrealism is not dead.
—Chris Howell
Review by Pete Mladinic.
When Correlation is Causation Sample Poems:
Let My Great Apes Go
Casual or causal be the rap, but be an interval without endpoints, a sea of slot machine with gratitude, resentment and points in between. A patriot is sounding one alarm if two are walking by and two if three are loitering. It’s 10 AM. Your music splits no ear. The path of least resistance far from fixed, what this continuum is missing is concurrent birdsong. Typhoid Mary, mother of the super-spreader, mathematical induction, who’s on n plus first?
Portmanteau
To the naked man and woman God said, Who said you have one iota of redeeming social value? Bounded by tautology and contradiction, fun was had by all but twenty. If you crossed a picket line which was invisible then the ekphrasis that you sang was seething. Islands of potential energy, the gods are bumping fists. Five sheets of cardboard on the concrete and you still can’t sleep? Don’t pay attention to that pervert, Rorschach — symmetry is where you find it. Keep your eye on that expected value, Esperanza — sum the products of the outcomes and their probabilities. You’re just the messenger and when the rapture happens you’ll be busy training your replacement.