Each year our Pavilion Poetry students assist with the publishing of our new collections, dedicating their time to an individual poet. In this interview, Olivia Soper talks with author Alice Miller about her new collection, Here & Thereafter (Pavilion Poetry, 2026).

We centre on your experience of present-day Berlin as a new mother and the experience of your German-Jewish grandmother who was forced to leave. How did it evolve from an idea into a final collection?

I began with a problem: I was in Berlin, a few weeks from my baby’s due date, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russians were shooting at a nuclear power station about 1,000 miles from where we live. I was reminded of my grandmother, a German Jew, who fled Germany in the 1930s, and had a baby in London while the bombs were falling in 1941. That baby was my father..

Here & Thereafter is your third collection to be published with Pavilion Poetry. How does it feel to publish your collection and does the experience differ between collections?

This collection does feel different and more uncomfortable for me, because more than ever, there has to be some sort of reckoning: why write poems, while the world order is crumbling, while new horrors and threats are emerging everyday? What’s happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in the US—what on earth can poetry do for any of this? What can poetry do while Germany is supplying arms to Israel to use against Palestinians? How can we keep sitting at a desk, grappling with ottava rima? We can’t go on; we go on.

This collection combines the personal and political. How would you like your audience to respond to this collection?

On a lighter note, I’ve always appreciated that poetry’s readership is small, and that writing poems feels like a slightly ridiculous act. Beware the lofty poet who enunciates for an imagined crowd. Writing a poem feels risky and playful, like leaping into a paddling pool that becomes the sea that becomes a city.

At the same time, we’re living in a time that lacks nuance, and poems do try to peer into the in-between spaces, the possibility of stacking questions upon questions, of trying to answer and failing, of asking again. I often go back to the end of Citizen, where Claudia Rankine writes: ‘I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.’

The collection questions whether new beginnings are ever possible. Do you feel that new beginnings are possible? Has the process of writing this collection altered your perspective on new beginnings?

A new beginning sounds lovely! It’s important as an idea, isn’t it? This book is partly about the birth of my only child, a completely astonishing moment that rewrote my ideas about beginnings. And yet every child is born into endless ideas of the past and the future. As we know from poems, making it new has a history.

---

Alice Miller is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand living in Berlin. She is the author of three previous poetry collections and a novel. Her collection Nowhere Nearer (Pavilion, 2018) was a PBS Recommendation and her novel about Georgie Yeats, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House, 2020) was a New York Times summer selection. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters, Alice is currently on the faculty of the MFA programme at Cedar Crest College.

Follow @pavilionpoetrylup on Instagram and visit our website to pre-order Here & Thereafter.

---

Pavilion Poetry Launch 2026

Join us in Liverpool on Thursday 30th April to launch our new collections from Natalie Linh Bolderston, Linda Anderson, and Alice Miller with the Centre for New and International Writing. Register for the free event here.

---

Follow us for more updates
Sign up to our mailing list
Twitter | Instagram
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk