US author Ron Riekki’s writing takes the measure of topics some might prefer not be discussed – protest, authoritarianism, immigration – as well as issues of which there’s too little discussion – prisons, overpopulation…. Below, references to some recent work …
and
the Chinese artist talks about holding up signs in Hong
Kong that were all white, not allowed to have signs with
actual words, so this haunting image, this effective image
of hundreds of artists and writers and protestors and students
holding up these white signs, ghost signs meant to haunt
politicians …
(from Riekki’s poem ‘WE’RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER’, published 29th March 2025 in ‘Verse News‘)
And in an unrelated interview, published in ‘The Adirondack Review‘ of Winter 2021, Riekki’s queried about the effect of the pandemic on his work. He replies that he’d been interested in writing a pandemic book previous to covid, but ‘Then the pandemic happened and I realized it was too late.’
These days, ‘if you pitch a pandemic-related book, you have to jump into the monstrous slush pile. But it’s been making me think about other issues that are right in our face that people are ignoring right now, but that we better put a light on early before things explode. I wonder what it is that we’re missing that’s right in front of us now. Maybe overpopulation? The prison system? I kind of feel that the next thing that’s going to be a massive concern for us is going to be those two things. It’s probably a reason why I try to write about both….’
(Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017.)