This volume of original poetry is prefaced by a critical introduction examining the narrative distancing strategies present in Louise Glück’s The Seven Ages. The introduction focuses on the tendency of Glück’s speakers to create distance between themselves and volatile emotions and addresses these distancing techniques in groupings of childhood, adolescent, adult, and domestic poems. In a larger context, the introduction examines how Glück’s speakers ultimately construct their own identities and define autonomous boundaries by both attempting to adhere to prescribed ideals and rejecting conventional depictions of womanhood. The subsequent collection of poetry seeks to define the existing boundaries between self and other in both family and love relationships, to examine the impossibility of returning to or sharing in any truthful way our separate pasts, and to define personal truths in the middle distance between that which we have been taught and that which we have learned.