“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” A quote attributed to John Quincy Adams, though it is quite possible that is a paraphrase. To go from being a gang-banger in Othello, Washington, to a bigger gang called the U.S. Army, almost dying three times in the theater of war, to find himself as a poet, interviewing undocumented people and telling their stories in lyric verse in Spanish and English. This is the story of Ricardo Ruiz and it’s told in his debut book: We Had Our Reasons or Teníamos Nuestras Razones in his lengua materna.