Originally published in 1965 as a novel, due (as the current publisher notes) to issues of privacy and political concerns in Ireland and the US, poet Muriel Rukeyser's memoir is here presented as its author intended. As Sharon Olds notes in her Preface, "The Orgy", set during Rukeyser's visit at the request of a friend to Puck Fair in County Kerry, Ireland, the last pagan festival, where "the goat is the king of all", is "the story of a search less for sexual experience than for knowledge of the meaning of sexual experience.... It is an odyssey written at a crossroads. It is a tale in which issues of loneliness, autonomy, oppression, sexual identity, prejudice, and sexual preference lie on or just under the surface.... "The Orgy" has layers, and secrets.... It is a message in a bottle -- a brilliant packet of messages in a far-traveled bottle".