Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies

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 eighteen 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.

Dani Netherclift is a poet and essayist living and writing on unceded Taungurung Country in Australia. Dani has a PhD in Creative Writing with a specialization in the elegiac lyric essay. Her shorter essays and poems have been widely published in Australia in literary journals and anthologies. She has won or been otherwise commended in multiple writing competitions.