Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

Alive Together gathers new poems together with a wide selection from Lisel Mueller's earlier books, moving across a career built out of her own emigration from Nazi Germany, the English language she had to learn as a teenager, and the domestic American life she built afterward. Mueller left Hamburg with her family in 1939, when she was fifteen, and the book returns repeatedly to that departure and to what a person carries out of a country when they cannot go back to it, the German language itself among the losses, alongside specific family memories from before the family fled.

Her lines are plain and accessible on the surface, built from everyday vocabulary rather than difficult diction, but that clarity carries real historical weight underneath it; a poem about an ordinary American afternoon can turn, in a line or two, toward the family history running beneath it. Mueller's poem "Curriculum Vitae" states the book's underlying claim directly: that her own country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes, treating displacement and persecution as a fact of biography rather than as abstract political history.

Reading Alive Together means encountering a quietly persistent sense of loss inside poems that, on a first pass, can seem simply gentle or domestic, an effect Mueller builds through restraint rather than through any dramatic gesture. It suits a reader drawn to poetry of emigration and inherited memory that never raises its voice, and to a poet who spent decades turning one family's specific escape from Nazi Germany into some of the more understated, deeply felt poems of her generation.