The Ovidian Renaissance seems to have left the behind. The poem has remained marginal, read either as a reversal of the 's teaching that brings the world of Ovidian elegy to a banal end, or as an over-determined supplement to the which ironically fails in its ostensible aim of 'curing' the dissatisfied lover. While recent work has explored how the poem functions not just as a palinode to, but also as a continuation of, the , the critical status quo continues to present it as a minor appendage rather than as an important chapter in Ovid's project as a poet of desire. Victoria Rimell's commentary resets critical perspectives by reading the as distinctive and original, and as a pivotal text within Ovid's oeuvre as a whole. In her immersive, creatively interpretative guide to the poem, the emerges as an intricate work that interacts with medical texts, works on rhetoric, law, magic and ritual, philosophical thinking about self-discipline, the irrational, consolation and therapy for the soul, as well as with Greco-Roman satire, lyric, epigram, and traditions of didactic and erotodidactic verse. The poem, Rimell argues, is a key node in Ovid's development of a poetics of paradox, reversibility, and auto-immunity.