The wonderful poet Tony Leuzzi (The Burning Door, Radiant Losses) has written an insightful review of The Erotic Postulate for Lambda Literary. Tony is clearly an ideal and well-read reader, picking up on the influences of people like Marianne Moore with the syllabic calculations, the reasons for the experimentation with punctuation, the philosophical bent to the inquiring voice of these poems. Here’s a couple excerpts:
Weighing in at over 100 pages of verse, The Erotic Postulate is a full and generous experience that deserves all of the demands it makes upon its readers. Sexy and smart, these poems pivot on surprising leaps and turns of language.
And:
Many poets exploring connections between math and poetry have restricted their attentions to issues of form. By contrast, Hittinger’s approach is more philosophically integrated. Reacting to various sources and telling moments of observation and memory, he ties conceptual frameworks with personal history. He sees that geometry is not the cold study of numbers and facts but a complex, abstract system of human thought inevitably tied to our values and feelings. It is from the perspective of a humanist that Hittinger deconstructs and extends math’s most basic (and deceptive) equation: 1+1=2.
Go check it out!