SOURCE: “A Want Ad, ” in Georgia Review, Vol. 44, Nos. 1–2, Spring-Summer, 1990, pp. 256–71.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen applauds the sensibility and accessibility of Mueller's Waving From Shore.

… Lisel Mueller's fifth full-length collection, Waving from Shore, hands us a space in which to recover the self. She understands the power of the lyric; her poems turn on a spindle of silence. Muller's territory is what cannot be said, and that she finds a way to say it is her genius. Precisely because there is a real self, and a lived life, behind these poems, Mueller does not deny her feminine sensibility; her body is in harmony with her mind. Take, for example, “Joy,” a poem in which she remembers the youthful experience of crying on hearing music:

But it happened again. It happens when we make bottomless love— there follows a bottomless sadness which is not despair but its nameless...