The Long Journey Out

by Ronald Okuaki Lieber

Overview

The poems in The Long Journey Out offer glimpses of the transcendent and ineffable—heightened rhapsodic perceptions arising from earlier, more empirical, observations. The world they describe is richly varied, culturally, spiritually, and linguistically. Yet threaded throughout his lyrical journey are these numinous moments, not yet explicable in doctrine but in empathic intuitions poetry can serve. Having learned from his travels, the journeyer is freed to return home, confident that despite our socioeconomic and political fractures, everyday human existence is grounded in a shared, sacred mystery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666768671
Publisher:	Resource Publications (CA)
Publication date:	08/31/2023
Pages:	90
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.19(d)

About the Author

Ronald Okuaki Lieber is the son of two strong lineages, that of a Japanese mother and a Jewish American military man, and lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of his life as an army brat. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica before settling in NYC where he is a tenured professor at SUNY Nassau and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Ronald Okuaki Lieber is a seeker. He looks at the Earth and finds moments of transfiguration. He has his own way of seeing things that is both moral and physical. He doesn’t belong to any school. Since he is naturally observant, he is a poet of description—sad and truthful, tender and raw. The more I read his classically poised, languorous poems, the more disturbingly beautiful they seem.”

—Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994–2022



“The poems in Ronald Okuaki Lieber’s first book create narrative richness of diverse worlds. His poems find the motion in stillness and the sound in silence and the light in darkness through a lyrical and mesmerizing voice describing a journey of questioning and observing. This is beautiful work, at once precise and direct and at the same time lush and evocative, poetry that lives up to the command to make it new.”

—Rebecca Weiner Tompkins, author of King of the Fireflies



“The poems in Ronald Okuaki Lieber’s The Long Journey Out root themselves first in settings rendered with such loving and attentive detail that they shimmer with significance. In poem after poem, the speaker grapples with what he sees—doing the work that we all need to do to embrace the fact that we can have no other life than the one we’ve lived and to learn how, because we are all going to die, to let that be enough.”

—Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah

Editorial Reviews

Ronald Okuaki Lieber is a seeker. He looks at the Earth and finds moments of transfiguration. He has his own way of seeing things that is both moral and physical. He doesn’t belong to any school. Since he is naturally observant, he is a poet of description—sad and truthful, tender and raw. The more I read his classically poised, languorous poems, the more disturbingly beautiful they seem.”

—Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994–2022



“The poems in Ronald Okuaki Lieber’s first book create narrative richness of diverse worlds. His poems find the motion in stillness and the sound in silence and the light in darkness through a lyrical and mesmerizing voice describing a journey of questioning and observing. This is beautiful work, at once precise and direct and at the same time lush and evocative, poetry that lives up to the command to make it new.”

—Rebecca Weiner Tompkins, author of King of the Fireflies



“The poems in Ronald Okuaki Lieber’s The Long Journey Out root themselves first in settings rendered with such loving and attentive detail that they shimmer with significance. In poem after poem, the speaker grapples with what he sees—doing the work that we all need to do to embrace the fact that we can have no other life than the one we’ve lived and to learn how, because we are all going to die, to let that be enough.”

—Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah

From the Publisher

2024-05-23
Lieber uses details both small and infinite to explore the mind in this poetry collection.

A poet is a witness; everything the eye can see and the mind can remember can be put to paper and preserved. In this collection, the poet and his speakers embody this idea, gathering details from their day-to-day lives to home in on, from a hike with a young daughter to a talk with an old lover to a consideration of how to make the most of a nice afternoon in Manhattan. The collection is divided into four sections, but the text resembles the form of a novel. There’s a one-poem prologue, and a body that contains most of the verses; a couple of poems act as an epilogue, followed by an afterword. Lieber plays with character and physicality—many of the works feel expansive and ephemeral, without a body within them. (Occasionally, people appear in the peripheries.) The stakes can vary wildly: A janitor eats the tuna sandwich from his packed lunch, a woman tends to her garden, a father faces imminent death with a child in his arms. Lieber’s background as a psychoanalyst comes through obliquely in some poems that reference philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy text. These poems feel more academic and less organic in their approach than the others, but all the work seeks what lies beyond that which can be seen, felt, heard, or tasted.

It’s hard to find new ways to capture how the natural world compels us, but Lieber has a sure knack for finding the finest, smallest details to evoke a scene; even New Jersey can become a place of “verve and luster,” with “an alpine / picture window bathed in the afterwash of an afternoon’s ease” (“Concordance”). The emotional register of the collection never escalates to rage, true oppressive sadness, or frenetic joy; everything is tinged with “something less decisive than goodbye.” The prevailing mood of the work is something like melancholy, but not quite. The book has a pervading sense of the inevitable—each vesper of mist, each bird, each manifestation of sage feels like surrender. (Of course, that which cannot neatly fit into emotional boxes becomes the scaffolding for poetry.) These verses, as their speakers traverse Manhattan streets, weather storms in Chad, and navigate Long Island Sound, are for minds in transit, offering “an emptying / the chest hollowed out” (“Autumn Song”) and acceptance for what was and what will not be. “Of all the body / the hands ache the most,” Lieber writes; “The hands reach out / and float, the fingers kneading / the air in random rhythm, as if remembering / the first time absence had a face” (“New Suffolk”). As readers, we all have that face committed to the mind’s eye, made all the more beautiful because it will never be seen again.

A penetrating, measured group of poems exploring wonder, emotion, and the ways the world moves us.

Kirkus Reviews