A Review by Caiden Leavitt
The title of Ron Starbuck’s new book of poetry, You Are Accepted, is repeated if not in exact recitation then in spirit as a refrain throughout the entire collection. The poems are replete with similar affirmations of human value: ‘we are held,’ ‘we are loved,’ ‘we are embraced.’ Starbuck’s seeming favorite, ‘we are known’ is repeated no less than five times.
This move from the second person of the title to the first person plural does not seem to be a coincidence. The collection invites us into an intimacy that is only possible through the version of Christ-love that Starbuck imagines, i.e., a collective one. There is a sense in the simple yet potentially harrowing reality that the only way to know that you are accepted is to know that everyone is.
The collection is in conversation with the theologian Paul Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundation. In the words of Starbuck “each poem pairs with a chapter from that book—not as a commentary, but as a kind of liturgical echo.” That said, a reader need not be familiar with Tillich’s work. In fact, if the work of Tillich, the German existentialist philosopher, feels like a slog, this book of sparse but moving poetry might be a powerful substitute.
Admittedly, as I worked through the collection, I found myself resistant in moments to the spell Starbuck was casting. I know this, I kept thinking as Starbuck continued to bang the gong of self-acceptance. But do I? There are several planes of knowing, many of (and perhaps the best of) which exist beyond the horizon of the conscious. As I progressed, I began to question my supposed mastery of the philosophy for which Starbuck was advocating. Soon, I found I had indeed fallen under the spell of Starbuck’s reiteration, which coaxes a knowing that is precisely beyond thought. What at first felt repetitive transformed into a kind of liturgy, just as Starbuck had promised in the preface, words repeated until they are made strange and can be heard anew.
One of the challenges of contemporary evangelism is that the most radical of the Bible’s promises have been, like yesterday’s fresh, young starlet, too exposed, spoken in too many contexts in which they were not meant. Some pastors resort to literal smoke and mirrors or metaphors so strained that they circle back to cliche in order to jolt the new generations to attention, and if they are lucky, belief (though, it would seem they might be more successful at the former than the latter). Starbuck’s is a simpler solution. Perhaps we need simply to continue to speak the most basic of spiritual truths until they can be believed.
That is not to say the poems are too simplistic. There are several moments of stunning mystery: “we have watched cities bombed/ and burned down to their names”; “We crowned ourselves with the dust of Eden.” But these moments do not strain into strangeness as some poetry does. It left me wondering if we, as writers, are not so much called to say something original as to say something true.
In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, when discussing the kind of aphorisms used in recovery rooms, David Foster Wallace writes, “clichés earned their status as clichés because they’re so obviously true.” So often, those of us who like to count ourselves as intellectuals turn up our noses at simple, quiet truths. Yet, suffering knows no status, and the relative success of programs like AA in helping those in active pain might be its own conclusion.
After finishing this collection, I sensed that I, at the very least, would do well to take a page out of Ron Starbuck’s book, to remember that simple truth that obliterates any need for sophistication:
You are accepted. You are accepted. You are accepted.
You Are Accepted: In Conversation with Paul Tillich by Ron Starbuck was published by Julian Press in 2025,
Caiden Leavitt received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University in 2025 and her bachelor’s from Cornell University in 2008, where she wrote for The Cornell Daily Sun. She currently lives on the coast of southern Maine.