In a 1989 interview with Stan Sanvel Rubin and William Heyen, Lisel Mueller stated: "Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here [in the United States] than anywhere. At the same time I am not a native; I see the culture and myself in it, through a scrim, with European eyes, and my poetry accommodates a bias toward historical determinism...." Because Mueller's poems are written in English, her second language (her first being German), they reflect an awareness of what words can and cannot do. With her intuitive understanding of the relationship between sign and signified (word and thing), she embodies some of the basic assertions of French theorist Jacques Derrida. She resembles one of her favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, in unearthing imaginative possibilities in the nature of language itself. For Mueller the essential quest is the connection between image...