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.