Posttraumatic: A Memoir

by Ron Riekki

Ron Riekki's Posttraumatic is at turns heartbreaking and hysterically funny, profound and absurd, filled with acerbic wit and a sense of childlike innocence. Drawing on Riekki's experience in the military, as an EMT, as an actor, his time at a marketing firm in China, and much, much more, the essays contained in Posttraumatic are at times hard to believe, but are never short of brutally honest.

"Ron Riekki's voice is savage, funny, angry, and very often mesmerizing. With this what-the-hell-is-this-exactly collection, he's written a deeply American and triumphantly strange examination of our national character—also known as 'the mess we're in.' I both admire and am baffled by this wonderful little book."
—Tom Bissell, journalist, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories and co-author ofThe Disaster Artist

"Ron Riekki has lived in the world's back alleys, prisons, ambulances, far flung hellholes, with the Navy and the Air Force, as an EMT or a standup comedian, a teacher, a student—but he's a writer and a poet above all else, and he writes about life, death, hope, despair, God, and madness in a way nobody else can. Hilarious, provocative, and often devastating, but always honest, always real. This book is a fever dream with no cure. "
—Steve Hamilton, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Lock Artist and Dead Man Running

135 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2019

About the author

Ron Riekki’s books include U.P.: a novel (Ghost Road Press) and Posttraumatic: A Memoir (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle/Four Chambers Press), as well as the upcoming hybrid collection My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, 2019) and the poetry book i have been warned not to write about this (Main Street Rag, 2020). Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise (McFarland), and edited And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book). He has anthologies upcoming with McFarland and WSU Press. His fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Wigleaf, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Akashic Books, Juked, New Ohio Review, Cleaver, Puerto del Sol, and many other literary journals. Riekki’s story “Accidents” received the 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize and “The Family Jewel” was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2015.