In a past century Heikki Huotari was carried by an undertow into the Atlantic Ocean, was on an airplane that landed in a wheat field, grew up on a subsistence farm, attended a one-room school and spent several summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. Drafted into the US Army for cannon fodder in 1968 (next stop, Vietnam), his application for discharge as a conscientious objector was denied (the Baptist chaplain said his faith was too eclectic) so he fasted to collapse, was intravenously force-fed, court-martialed for refusing to eat, then medically discharged. Having after some years acquired a new personality, he earned a PhD in mathematics and pursued a career in teaching and research, was an enthusiastic and nationally ranked master's marathon runner, discovered the totally tubular convex set and explored its use in the study of non-linear statistical inference and the geometry of Banach spaces. He retired from academia in 2012 and undertook to learn to write creatively. He has published poems in 200 or so literary journals, and books and chapbooks, four of which have won prizes. When Correlation is Causation is his fifth collection.