The title of Rachel Zucker’s third poetry collection, “The Bad Wife Handbook,” invites certain preconceptions. A reader might expect bridling at the institution of marriage (it’s here), suggestions of infidelity (if only imagined), lust (yes), loneliness (definitely). If that were all, this collection would be part of a well-established literature of independent-minded women on marriage and its discontents. But Ms. Zucker has a more provocative understanding of what makes a “bad wife.” Her greatest sin is not any deed or thought of infidelity, but simply her inability — and unwillingness — to get outside her head. It’s a problem of empathy. “Some women cherish the fathomless want of infants,” she writes in a long sequence poem. “As it is all around me I cannot muster judgment and having been stayed from my sentence these three days by a stutter of double dashes — I — / am still, I.”

Ms. Zucker’s language is associative, fractured, and sometimes difficult (“planes always wanted to / lighthouse, cliffside, pride”), but there is a trajectory to her poems. “The Bad Wife” is divided into five parts. While formally and thematically distinct — and not always chronological — the sections build on each other, creating a loose, if incomplete, story about settling into marriage and the early years of motherhood. The urgent intensity of the “I” remains constant — at once promising to tell all (“Shall we discuss married sex?”) while holding others at a remove. Only the reader is allowed inside — and even here, there are exceptions, things withheld.

For example: Who is the husband? In the first section — the least successful, despite rewarding moments (including not one but two remarkable descriptions of a snow flurry) — this seems to be an important question. But “the husband” — who is called “my husband” usually in absentia (“that man there, so unlike / my husband”; “His face is the face of all men / not my husband”) — is too faint a presence to care about. Some poems, written in short couplets, feature an unidentified “he,” but it is hard to tell whether “he” is the husband or another man. Both possibilities are suggested. Either one might as well be on another planet. In the poem “Galaxies Rushing Away,” the speaker reaches for the language of cosmology to describe the radical distance between man and woman: “every galaxy / from every galaxy, vow, promise, primordial / atom — rushing faster, all on our way / to greater disorder.” In a seven-couplet poem, this apocalyptic vision doesn’t seem justified. Especially since one gets the sense — in poems such as “My Beautiful Wickedness” — that Ms. Zucker enjoys being the bad wife.

The speaker expresses alienation more convincingly in two long sequence poems, “Squirrel in a Palm Tree” and “Annunciation.” Here, her lines lengthen and loosen — and children appear. In “Squirrel in a Palm Tree,” which takes place on a plane between Savannah, Ga., and New York City, a mother’s thoughts languidly wander between the landscape below (“the settled patches rise / like lily pads on tree-green ponds, the roads lascivious zippers”) and her two young boys at home. The moon, a common trope for motherhood, is beautifully imagined as a body:

the moon is so full it must recline
the hip is the location the child claims
and aches
from use, from absence

Such is the mother’s fate: to be cratered and carved by the impact of her child, to feel weariness and longing in equal measure. The thought invites a sweet memory: “I miss … / when the child falls forward and catches himself with his hands, stands carefully, bunches his face: fine, fine, I get to hold him now and kiss his palms and put my nose against his cheek.”

Yet, so high in the air, she feels far away: “My children at this remove are figures, figments / the difference between here and there.” The poem ends ambivalently, as the plane descends into La Guardia Airport, when the speaker notices the Empire State Building “with her glinting, ramrod posture, suddenly / alone above her waist-high charges.” It is a striking image of the mother as lonely sentinel, on guard against external dangers, but also unable to bend down to her children, to put her nose against their cheeks. “Annunciation” is the most risky of Ms. Zucker’s poems, and the best. The 16 sections, written in long, tidal lines, range from the balconies of Florence, Italy, to the shores of Nova Scotia. The thread that holds them together is a series of meditations on Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation scene. It may be hubris to identify with the Virgin Mary — but when Ms. Zucker does it, it works. In her interpretation, Mary is reading, happy, preoccupied. When she sees Gabriel, she “raises her other hand / as if to a man offering stolen watches, ‘not interested’ — she looks comfortable.” Of course, she doesn’t have a choice. In imagining herself as Mary, Ms. Zucker suggests she knows her husband about as well as the girl knows Gabriel.

Ms. Zucker wants a spiritual connection.

there are two sides two centers therefore an interior or, instead, between —

a space that is neither, a passage, a pause — of moment is the thing exposed but not within —

here we walk as if together as if — scent of testosterone, then gone — another’s

Madeline, another epic — I am outside and in and up and on — who knows perhaps I am also in your thoughts as you, your stand-in, are in mine?

How can the wife enter her husband’s mind, when she knows him only as a stand-in — a space between two separate beings?

And yet — something holds them together. Something that Ms. Zucker sometimes feels the need to resist. In a series of (often comic) “Autobiographies” that close the book, she writes: “Damn that night with her pester / whispering lean … / against him,” as if leaning in would mean losing a part of herself. But there’s this, too: “we are happier than the poems describe / I more I, you completely ___,” she writes in a long sequence section, “The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma.” The union of two souls may be too much to ask, but people still depend on each other. At the very least, it’s biology:

Twist sense and anti-sense strands together; cut one;

we unwind.

It takes energy to nick the supercoiled structure hard enough —

(they want to bind)

but it can be broken.

We are wound, not knotted.

This is classic Zucker: pessimistic, but ultimately affirming. It’s hard to suggest a metaphor for marriage more vital than DNA.

Ms. Thomas has written for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and other publications.