Like William Carlos Williams, who was a pediatrician, Lieberman manages a second career as poet. His work is very different from Mary Karr's. To begin with, he is much engaged in poetic forms. In Sojourn at Elmhurst he employs blank verse, free verse, terza rima and a villanelle, with stretches written as prose poems, one in the form of a hospital admissions form, another as a journal entry addressed to Anne Frank. Karr would approve of these poems, however.
Language never obscures meaning, and form never becomes merely ornamental.
Also unlike Karr, Lieberman doesn't seem always to be writing about his life and emotions or those of his family and friends. The central character in this sequence is a fictitious biochemist, Dr. Frank Goldin, who perceives himself to have suffered a mental breakdown and has himself hospitalized. His confused mental state leads him to question his faith and existence. In his self-examinations he has encounters with an alter ego, Rabbi Yehuda of Smyrna, and his own psychiatrist, a Dr. Hudsputh. Goldin also conjures up Da-ling, a Chinese woman with whom he once had a brief affair, and Helen, his wife, who never visits him in the hospital.