Vessel

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An evocative, lyric bricolage of memoir, literature, history, and translation that wrestles with the shape death takes.

Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.

In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria, Australia. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn’t stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.

What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.

AUTHOR

Dani Netherclift

Reviews

Vessel is a powerful current of words an unmooring exploration of mortality In its flow it carries lost bodies fragments of conversation snippets of philosophy and history I am grateful for this singular book its hunger and eloquenceMartha Baillie author of There Is No Blue

In interleaving her own familys narrative with the writing of others Vessel transcends personal elegy and becomes something more ambitious writing as testament as reclamation as communionMascara Literary Review

Vessel interleaves a delicate curation of memorys traces and fragments with poetries of forgetting and remembering Netherclift is a writer of exceptional lyrical gifts and a brilliant anatomist of memory even when facing loss and trauma Vessel weighs what might be held in language with what is fleeting and porous in restive inventive and deeply moving waysFelicity Plunkett author of A Kinder Sea

In a world increasingly indifferent toor suspicious ofliterature I am supremely grateful for works like Vessel short intense deeply intelligent and profoundly moving Dani Netherclifts account of loss and the long process of engaging with that loss is always compelling Netherclift has crafted an elegiac lyric essay that is both in touch with its antecedents and unlike anything I have ever read I am left grateful for her artistry and generosityDavid McCooey author of The Book of Falling

Utterly captivating and written with searing intelligence Dani Netherclifts Vessel is a poetic tender and moving meditation on grief time memory and love and the shapes we leave behindAriane Beeston author of Because Im Not Myself You See