Blood / Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems

A prolific creator of books and anthologies centered on Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, Ron Riekki now delivers an insightful, poetic exploration of wartime trauma and healing.

Riekki is an author of poetry, fiction, memoir, theater, and film. He is also an Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm veteran of the U.S. Navy, as well as the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

"With gusty cuts and scalpel grace, Ron Riekki is clear-eyed and unsentimental as he navigates his own human terrain back from war and other traumas. Military veterans and families of all eras will appreciate how Riekki lights his way—his waypoints may differ from yours, but our journeys are often the same," says U.S. Army veteran Randy Brown, editor and publisher of Middle West Press.

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I tell My PTSD counselor that I spent a hundred bucks

at a strip club
and I feel like hell.
He asks, “Why hell?”
And I say that I was suicidal.
And he says, “And it helped you forget?”
And I say, “Yeah.”
And he says, “So?”
And I stare at a fish tank that has no fish in it.
It’s just a tank.
And it’s quiet.
And then the counselor tells me that soldiers used to bleed to death.
He says they’d get shot in the arm, the leg, and the medics would try to save them.
They didn’t realize the importance of tourniquets,
that you can lose the arm and save the life.
He asks me if I’d rather lose my arm or stay alive.
I tell him I’d rather stay alive.
There are a lot of tourniquets, he says,
just don’t use them too often or you’ll lose your arms, your legs

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Here's what others are saying about Blood / Not Blood ... Then the Gates:

“Ron Riekki stares into the violence and aftermath of prisons and poverty and addiction and especially war, sometimes unflinchingly, other times with such true, human flinches that I feel them in my own hands as I hold the pages. Individually, many of these poems are almost unbearable in their relentless and ugly truths, but taken collectively their beauty is that of a path, like Dante’s, through what infernos we have made, to a saved life and—somehow—deeper humanity.”
—Jonathan Johnson, author of May is an Island and The Desk on the Sea

“Riekki does not leave us hopeless as he progresses into post-traumatic growth—‘controlling my breath, my thoughts, my history that I was creating […]’ If you are sincere in your desire to support and understand Veterans, then you need to be reading contemporary Veteran literature.”
—Suzanne S. Rancourt, author of murmurs at the gate and Billboards in the Clouds

“Ron Riekki won’t let you think poetry is just for your head. His book drags our bodies into the game. The work swirls and revisits past events, the visceral drumbeat of painful memories. The faint hope at the end gives perspective to where Riekki has been. This collection is like his description of swimming in a frigid river: It’s a sort of cure.”
—Eric Chandler, author of Kekekabic and Hugging This Rock

“‘The war is language,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in ‘Wichita Vortext Sutra.’ Ron Riekki’s gone to war and proved that the pen is mightier than the M60 machine gun. In these poems, he douses flaming helicopters with the water of poetry, he translates tortured screams into English, into poetry, into sighs of relief. War is Hell, and Ron Riekki is the Virgil we need to walk us through it.”
—Tom C. Hunley, author of What Feels Like Love