{"id":1569,"date":"2025-03-29T21:10:47","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/?p=1569"},"modified":"2025-03-29T21:38:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:38:52","slug":"ron-riekki-were-sitting-around-a-table-not-far-from-the-russian-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/2025\/03\/29\/ron-riekki-were-sitting-around-a-table-not-far-from-the-russian-border\/","title":{"rendered":"Ron Riekki | WE’RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER"},"content":{"rendered":"
US author Ron Riekki’s writing takes the measure of topics some might prefer not be discussed \u2013 protest, authoritarianism, immigration \u2013 as well as issues of which there’s too little discussion \u2013 prisons, overpopulation…. Below, references to some recent work …<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 and<\/div>\n
the Chinese artist talks about holding up signs in Hong<\/div>\n
Kong that were all white, not allowed to have signs with<\/div>\n
actual words, so this haunting image, this effective image<\/div>\n
of hundreds of artists and writers and protestors and students<\/div>\n
holding up these white signs, ghost signs meant to haunt<\/div>\n
politicians …<\/div>\n

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(from Riekki’s poem ‘WE’RE SITTING AROUND A TABLE NOT FAR FROM THE RUSSIAN BORDER’, published 29th March 2025 in ‘Verse News<\/a>‘)<\/div>\n

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And in an unrelated interview, published in ‘The Adirondack Review<\/a>‘ 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 ‘<\/span>Then the pandemic happened and I realized it was too late.’<\/p>\n

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These days, ‘if you pitch a pandemic-related book, you have to jump into the monstrous slush pile.\u00a0\u00a0But it\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0I wonder what it is that we\u2019re missing that\u2019s right in front of us now.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe overpopulation?\u00a0\u00a0The prison system?\u00a0\u00a0I kind of feel that the next thing that\u2019s going to be a massive concern for us is going to be those two things.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s probably a reason why I try to write about both….’<\/span><\/div>\n

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(Ron Riekki<\/strong> wrote U.P.<\/em>: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works<\/em> (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula<\/em> (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017<\/em><\/a> (Michigan State University Press, 2017.)<\/div>\n
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US author Ron Riekki’s writing takes the measure of topics some might prefer not be discussed \u2013 protest, authoritarianism, immigration \u2013 as well as issues of which there’s too little …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2,302],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-riekki-ron","entry entry-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1569"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1581,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions\/1581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}