This book is equal parts excavation and resurrection.
 
Through her own poetry, classicist Josephine Balmer explores both the material and immemorial qualities of the written word. At the book's heart lies a lost play composed by the father of Greek tragedy (Aeschylus' The Myrmidons) which explicitly depicted Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. Around the tragedy of its gradual erasure and the miraculous accident of its partial preservation, Balmer weaves a tale of the historical characters who acted upon the text - distributing, censoring, and salvaging - while also imagining the ways the text acted upon its readers across millennia. Forgotten words that bubble up through the centuries.

"I am absolved because I loved him."

Perfect, devastating, changed my world, never ever going to forget this.