Paulette Guerin

Wading through Lethe Paulette Guerin

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.