Slow Return

slow return

Paul Lieber’s Slow Return confirms everything that’s previously been so captivating about his poetry. But this collection is different. Yes, there’s still his sly, wry humor, his honest, clear-eyed gaze, and his sensitive insights about the people who have passed through his life. In this collection, though, it’s his point-of-view that’s so arresting, his ability to go beyond the ekphrastic, to parse his past, glean details, and ultimately translate into poetry his interactivity with a book he encountered—a photographic memoir of 1960s Manhattan by a former Village Voice photographer. This is, in essence, a memoir sparked by memoir. But it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen the book or photographs that inspired these pieces or experienced, as Lieber did, the New York of that era. This is poetic portraiture and personal narrative of the best kind—scenes and characters (some famous, some infamous) from a specific time and place, a specific history; mind-sets, memories, and events come alive in poems that promise to stay with you, move you, in the here and now.
— Jim Natal