The poems in Samuel Hazo’s Sexes: The Marriage Dialogues are concerned with how husbands and wives confront each other at life’s various intersections sometimes casually, sometimes profoundly. It is at these points that the most interesting differences in gender reveal themselves.

From the first poem (“Banterers”) to the last (“Ballad of the Old Lovers”) Hazo’s attuned ear picks up quotidian conversational exchanges, but the words are never window dressing. They hint at inevitable insights and misunderstandings born out of conjugal love. Each poem is a vignette of the moving and surprising moments that are married life.