A powerful poetry collection explores the concepts of home and human migration through the lenses of the author’s personal and family history. An introduction titled “Migrant Poetry” briefly discusses the long history of human migration and elucidates the difference between a migrant and a refugee. Rosen’s Jewish family members, many of who were displaced or are “missing” due to the Holocaust, are the subject of the first section of poetry, in which the author ponders his family’s cultural traditions, songs, and languages—all of which originated in another country. A section titled “The War” recounts the author’s visit to Europe after World War II and his parents’ stories about the war, while “The Migrants in Me” is a meditation on the author’s challenging search for information about several family members who were murdered by Nazis. A final section, “On the Move Again,” draws connections between Rosen’s family history and refugees today. Underlying the collection is a plea for compassion: Throughout the world all kinds of people find themselves uprooted, for all kinds of reasons, all the time. (Ages 9-14)

In a masterful new collaboration, personal poems and poignant art illuminate the experience of refugees and immigrants everywhere.

That’s why
it can happen again.
It does happen again.
It has happened again.

Some of Michael Rosen’s relatives were lost before he was born, in the Holocaust. First, he wondered about them. And he wrote poems. Next, he searched for their stories. And he wrote poems. Then he found their stories. And he wrote poems. Now, in a companion book to The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, Michael Rosen has brought together forty-nine of his most powerful poems, exploring the themes of migration and displacement through the lens of his childhood in the shadow of World War II, the lives of his relatives during that war, and migration, refugees, and displacement today and tomorrow, here, there, and everywhere. Throughout, atmospheric watercolors from master illustrator Quentin Blake evoke the hardship, exhaustion, isolation, and companionship of being on the move. At once intimate and universal, On the Move probes the power of art to adapt, bear witness, and heal.