Last week, Terri-ann White, the publisher behind Upswell Publishing, announced the list of 17 books she will be publishing in 2024. I am thrilled to announce that my first book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies was included—it sits in impressive company. Here is a tiny synopsis of what my book is about. Vessel is part memoir, part long, fragmented lyric-essay, taking in many different versions of what it means to write a body after it has passed. This narrative is braided through with images of emptied vintage envelopes that once contained letters sent to my great grandmother in WWI, as well as other bodies of historical text. Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies will be released on November 3, 2024.
About the Book:
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. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw these loved ones again. But also, never 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, interleaving stories of what it means to lose the physical body of a person you love with a bricolage of literature, history and (vessel) translations, and the realisation that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.
