Wading through Lethe
United StatesAdded on January 12, 2026
Description
In Wading through Lethe, a girl growing up in rural Arkansas learns to navigate life, love, and loss as she approaches womanhood. She leaves home to study and to travel. The heroes and gods of Greek myth appear alongside Christian saints; rural landscapes and cicadas give way to Gothic churches and the Roman Forum. Metamorphosis is at the heart of these poems—the necessary transformations that leave us changed as memory pulls us to the past, where nothing and everything is the same. With musical language, these formal and free verse poems highlight the way we shape memory and the inevitability of forgetting. In the end, the search becomes not about discarding the past but about choosing what we keep. Orpheus may have lost Eurydice, but there is still music.
Reader Reviews
Guerin’s poetry cuts to the intimacy of the exotic and exposes the magical heartbeat of daily life, all with the feeling of a somewhat sad and knowing backward glance. A beautiful collection.
This is a superb collection - easily one of the best poetry collections I've read in many years. The poems manage to be both personal and intimate, often giving us unusual insights into what it's like to be a young woman in this period, while at the same time having mythical and universal dimensions. As someone who is not a poet myself, but does consider himself a writer, I hesitate to pontificate on poetry generally; I simply don't consider myself well-enough qualified to do so. But I am confid
This collection is so good! I try to keep up with my professors' publications, so I was super excited for this one, and though it took me a hot second to finish (due to time constraints, not lack of interest), it didn't disappoint. Guerin shares achingly beautiful memories and wishes in this collection, colored over with dust, dreams, and disappointment as the case may be. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd choose "At the Coffee Shop" (p. 64) or "Cyclist with Two Bikes" (p. 65), but they're all wo
