The Private Life: Poems

“Lisel Mueller’s poems are deeply felt and give pleasure because of their truth conveyed in sensuous terms. I found myself earmarking numbers of poems because they were compelling, satisfying, each a thing in itself.”—Richard Eberhart


The forty-three poems in this award winning collection by Lisel Mueller are written with a sense of history, an awareness of the inescapable changes taking place in our century and the effect on how we see our lives.


Each of the poems speaks from a separate moment of experience. Each of them in its own way, celebrates the autonomy of the self, the mysteries of intimacy, growth, and feeling, and the struggle against what one writer has called the “ongoing assault from without to be something palpable and identifiable.”