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.”


—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