Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His collection of poems, What We Don't Know About Each Other, won the National Poetry Series and was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. Recent books include The Probable World, Visible Signs: New & Selected Poems, and his seventh collection, The History of Forgetting (2009), all published by Penguin. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

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In seven numbered sections, this is a long poem about love, but atypically, philosophy, ghosts, dreams, even Ruskin enter the scene and, like multiple doors in a long corridor, some of these elements advance the theme and some initially interrupt only to extend and enrich the flow of speech, ideas, and imagination into a world that only Lawrence Raab could make believable and enjoyable.