Here and Thereafter

Personal and political collide in Alice Miller's fourth 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 evoke Mary Shelley, visitors to Antarctica, and an inventor of the atom bomb, to ask if a new beginning is ever possible. 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 escape?