Love in Another Language includes poems from eight previous collections of poetry, as well as a section of new poems, and a selection of excerpts from the author's book length verse translation from medieval Persian poetry. Prominent among the themes treated in the original poems are the experiences of travel and of living in a culture where one is a stranger, what happens when cultures come up against one another and mingle, and the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of empathy across temporal and cultural boundaries. Davis has been called "our finest translator of Persian poetry" (the TLS ), and "the leading translator of Persian literature in our time ( The Washington Post ), and the final section of the book, which consists of translations from medieval Persian, can be read as a record of various attempts at such empathy, in poetic terms, across both time (most of the works translated are from over 700 years ago) and cultural divisions.