Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime. The truth is always differentfrom what anyone says out loud,but who really cares? Not I, said the manI chose to be, nor I nor I nor I—among the many of us she left teetering.

Stephen Dunn

is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently

Lines of Defense ,

Here and Now , and

What Goes On: Selected & New Poems: 1995-2009 . He teaches at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.