That Other Life

Poems that deftly draw on the sonnet form to follow the speaker's romantic life.

That Other Life is a narrative about how relationships fail and succeed-or rather, about how the narrator fares on the changeable course of love and domestic commerce. Most of the poems in Joyce Sutphen's twelfth book are sonnets, and each sonnet provides a glimpse of a swiftly moving life. In the same carefully crafted language as she uses to describe an oat binder, Sutphen surveys marriage and love.