•  Dana Gioia’s “The Litany,” which can be found in his collection Interrogations at Noon (2001), contains a series of prayers that make powerful statements of love and loss and reveal the search for a way to comprehend the nature of suffering.

•  James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation” (1974), collected in his The Book of Ephraim—one of a group of three books in Merrill’s Divine Comedies (1976), is a complex study of loss and the artistic rendering of experience in its focus on the speaker’s often painful memories of his childhood.

•  Ruefle’s “When Adults Talk” appears on the page facing “Sentimental Education” in Post Meridian (2000). The two poems share a similar focus: the separation between adults...