The Long Journey Out
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.
Praise for The Long Journey Out
“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.”
“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”