Christopher Russell, a psychoanalyst and faculty member at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, speaks with Ronald Okuaki Lieber about his new book, The Long Journey Out (Resource Publications, 2023). Of the interview, Christopher writes, “The poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, and Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure of “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-scene, 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.