Ronald Okuaki Lieber, "The Long Journey Out" (Wipf and Stock, 2023)

Today I spoke with Ronald Okuaki Lieber about his new book, The Long Journey Out (Resource Publications, 2023)

These poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, And Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure from "psychedelic journey work.”

Throughout the collection, Lieber (who lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of his life as an army brat) is a master of mise-en-scène; each poem located somewhere more or less specific. The vicissitudes of the specificity change to meet the reader on the journey out. For me, this is movingly demonstrated in what I interpret as the central poem on the journey, Gare Montparnasse: The Melancholy of Departure, read beautifully by Lieber in the interview. Gare Montparnasse is a specific point of departure. The train, however, will not stop in our small provincial village.” Where is the village? The reader gets to decide.

Lieber considers his poems “as children” and would like to know how they’re doing in the world. “I want an audience for the for these poems. I want to know, oh, 'they did nothing to me’. Or ‘they evoked something’ or whatever. Anything. So, they're not just stillborn in a vacuum. My personal investment is to send my poems into the world and they will fare as they fare. But I want them to run into others.”

He would like to hear from all readers and can be reached through his website.

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