Each person lives but a single life—yet this is not wholly true. While our lives progress as a result of the choices we make—this career, that husband, this town, that house—we are left imagining a life we might have lived. If we are defined by our choices, in what ways are we limited by them? What of the spiritual lives we lead, the inner lives that others cannot truly know? Which life is truest?

A woman recalls her special bond with her father and compares it with her ties to other men; a man copes with his unloved life and finds a way to secretly inherit it; after making love for the first time, a young woman wishes to go back in time, erase what she’s done.

In readable, finely wrought, resonant, and memorable poems about the nature of longing and disappointment, desire and betrayal, pleasure and sorrow, The Other Life explores the dualities in life that every person experiences.