Here & Thereafter

Personal and political collide in Alice Miller’s fourth poetry collection, as she compares present-day Berlin, where she is a new mother, with the city her German-Jewish grandmother was forced to leave. Darting through bedrooms and empires, whispers and wars, bureaucracy and origin stories, these unpredictable poems invoke Mary Shelley, Homer, and the atom bomb to ask if we can ever find a new beginning. How many buildings and oceans, how many minutes and years, how many voices speak through us? And if the past is never past, can we ever repair the present?