The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, โAn unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.โ Sarah Manguso writes: โThe trainโs engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The trainโs 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.โ The Guardians is an elegy for Mangusoโs friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Mangusoโs fellowship year in Rome, Harrisโs death and the year that followedโthe year of mourning and the year of Mangusoโs marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harrisโs presence in and absence from Mangusoโs life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.