Do you remember going to a fair when you were a kid and riding the Scrambler? Remember getting your head whipped around so much that everything blurred together? Kind of made you want to hurl, right? Come on, we know we're not the only ones…

Anyway, whether you blew chunks or not, it's definitely time to grab your intellectual Dramamine. While Derek Walcott's 1990 epic poem Omeros won't literally make you heave (we hope), it's going to take hard work to keep track of who's who, what's what, and where the heck you are in time as you read this book.

Now for the good news: Unlike the Scrambler, which might just leave you lunch-less, Omeros is totally worth the work. But you don't have to take our word for it—this is the piece Walcott published right before being nominated (and winning) the Nobel Prize in Literature. Which means a lot of super smart people were majorly impressed.

What's so impressive? A lot of things. But while we'll unpack these fully in this learning guide, here we'll just say that this is not your mama's Iliad. Instead, this is a poem that offers a mind-boggling array of cultural connections, narrative voices, love stories, painful memories, and time-travel—all in one compact volume. That's storytelling at its finest, even if does make you a bit seasick.

There are ample reasons to give two figs about Omeros, but we think the biggest one is that we live in a country founded on slavery. And Omeros is about nothing if not the legacy of slavery and how it—at times literally—bleeds into the present (we're looking at your wound, Philoctete). And since we live in the present, too, this poem has some serious things to say to us.

If you're thinking yeah, yeah, I've heard this all before, then hang with us, because when it comes to Omeros and the ways in which the past is embedded in the present, it actually has a pretty hopeful tale to tell. We're not saying that the path to healing ever looks easy in this book (spoiler alert: it doesn't), but we are saying that this poem argues fiercely that healing from the past is possible—and it even shows us how.

So on the one hand, you should care about Omeros because we live in a world where the imprint of slavery lingers on and, though unpleasant, it's important to examine the ways in which this is true. But on the other hand, you should care about Omeros because it offers hope and guidance—not that the past will ever disappear from the present, but that the wounds it leaves us with will be mended.