“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 eloquence.”—Martha Baillie, author of There Is No Blue
“Beautiful, and terribly moving. She approaches unbearable loss with a delicate step, and walks right to its core, paying it the deepest possible respect.”—Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief and Monkey Grip
“In interleaving her own family’s narrative with the writing of others, Vessel transcends personal elegy, and becomes something more ambitious: writing as testament; as reclamation; as communion.”—Mascara Literary Review
Vessel interleaves a delicate curation of memory’s 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 ways.—Felicity Plunkett, author of A Kinder Sea
In a world increasingly indifferent to—or suspicious of—literature, I am supremely grateful for works like Vessel: short, intense, deeply intelligent, and profoundly moving. Dani Netherclift’s 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 generosity.—David McCooey, author of The Book of Falling
Utterly captivating and written with searing intelligence, Dani Netherclift’s Vessel is a poetic, tender and moving meditation on grief, time, memory and love and the shapes we leave behind.—Ariane Beeston, author of Because I’m Not Myself, You See