Diving into the Shipwreck is Adrienne Rich's most celebrated book of poems. It can be read as a response to the tradition in which The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot or the Cantos of Ezra Pound are inscribed. The poet plunges into the depths of an ocean of myths to explore the remains of a shipwreck. That shipwreck is our civilization, all its rottenness and all its beauty. Little by little, he gets rid of all the stories that surround the shipwreck, until he is left with only the essentials. She also sheds her woman's body, until she is left with a primordial body: an androgynous body, half mermaid, half merman. And she with him goes through the remains of what we were. But she, above all, she rescues what is still intact and that can help us rebuild a new civilization, where women are men and men are women. A new beginning stripped of stories and myths, focused on presence. A beginning not of equality, but of identification, of mutual recognition of our fragility, our strength, alone in the face of the nakedness of our bodies.