Following her 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner The Wild Iris, Louise Glück returned with this ambitious book-length sequence that interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of Homer's Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here too is a worldly Circe, a divided Odysseus, and a shrewd adolescent Telemachus. Through these classical figures, Glück explores such timeless themes as the endless negotiation of family life, the cruelty that intimacy enables, and the frustrating trivia of the everyday.