Averno

Reminiscent of the lyrical classic "Sonnets to Orpheus," Pulitzer Prize-winning poet offers readers a brillant reimagining of the myth of Persephone. Drawing the collection's title from the small crater lake in southern Italy that the Romans considered the mythical entrance to the Underworld, Gluck recasts the myth of Persephone, the future Queen of the underworld. In an extended sequence of poems Gluck tracks Persephone's journey from goddess on Earth to her eventual kidnapping by Hades. What "Averno" provides is not a map of her journey to Hades and back, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring present, in which the ecstatic and the inevitable are irrevocably fused.