My new poetry collection, Ophelia has been published!
You can buy the print book at most independent bookshops, either on the shelves or by asking them to order it for you. You can also order the print book directly from my publisher, Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million. The Kindle ebook is also at Amazon. You can read more about the book below…
Ophelia intertwines erasures of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with original poems to explore allegories of sexual assault, domestic violence, and death, spanning the centuries from classic mythology to the #metoo movement.
Foreword by ANKH SPICE, author of The Water Engine.
Advanced Praise:
“V.C. Myers’ Ophelia, extracted from the barest bones of the Bard’s language, is an agent of her own magic, untethered from the men who toss her from hand to hand. These poems are an exhale, a bloodletting—excising and displaying, as if pinned to a board in a natural history museum, the many various violences of a world arrayed against anything unlike the recognizable. Read them”
– CHASE BERGGRUN, author of R E D
“Ophelia is a reclamation and a wild cry, a flower of blood and ruin. Gothic undercurrents from Shakespeare’s Hamlet center Ophelia’s desires, betrayals, and trauma, pairing them with poems whose lush vibrancy shatters into violence across the page. Myers’ Ophelia recalls the verdant rot of Millais’ famous painting, Ophelia sinking into the dark currents, surrounded by riotous leaves. The beautiful is suffused with a brutality that threatens but also lures, vampiric and mesmerizing”
– ELIZABETH SYLVIA, author of None but Witches
“Ophelia calls with siren song… dark, brooding, dangerous… Myers has woven a tapestry of something beautiful out of darkness. Dare to let the tendrils of these poems snake around your ankles and haunt your dreams”
– MELA BLUST, author of They Found a Woman’s Body
“Ophelia is a praise-song for survivors… incantatory vengeance, festering and furious on behalf of all women who’ve been abused, chewed up, devoured, assaulted. Myers bravely and honestly probes the question: How does one heal when ‘trauma is a muscle memory’?”
– DAYNA PATTERSON, author of O Lady, Speak Again
“A lighthouse amid the tempestuous sea of self, bridging intimate experiences and universal truths. A trenchant commentary on our era. What a book!”
– ADEDAYO AGARAU, author of The Arrival of Rain
“Ophelia is a chorus of silenced women’s songs… Smart, stunning, brilliant…a testament to women’s voices, the power imbued when we are given the space to speak.”
– JESSICA DRAKE-THOMAS, author of Burials
“Timeless and transcendent. This book opens us all up to our vulnerabilities and imaginations”
– JOANNA C. VALENTE, author of η ψυχή, η ψυχή μας | the soul, our soul
“A beautiful collection of brutal truths… echoes in the hollows left by women’s voices unheard.”
– LINDY RYAN, author of Bless Your Heart and President, Black Spot Books
Reviews:
“[Ophelia] successfully weaves historical and contemporary reactions and trauma from domestic and sexual violence, using allegory and symbolism to explore and illustrate how such violence impacts its victims. <I>Ophelia</I> is sensitively and compassionately drawn.”
– Emma Lee, Emma Lee’s Blog
“This is Myers wielding sound and line break with devastating accuracy…alternating between heady linguistic acrobatics and blunt, plain-spoken confessionalism. The pattern reminds us that this poet, capable of elevated language, also has waded through some dirt in life. Yet these moments, too, contain the incantatory…”
– JD Ho, Moist Poetry Journal
“Myers’s narrative makes use of a powerful existentialism that makes the reader go beyond the depth of imagery and ruminate on the tender beauty found in the darkness, in the acceptance found in the fear and the power regained through the suffering. With targeted metaphor and an impressive prowess with regard to word economy and craft, it is in this collection that the reader witnesses daring duality and strength.”
– A. R. Arthur, Full house Literary Review
“Ophelia interweaves erasure and non-erasure poems to create a thematic whole. As a result, the collection simultaneously enacts and defies erasure in language, form, and history as the Ophelia sequence creates a powerful call-and-response with the collection’s other poems…Myers moves between these poetic categories to highlight the constant background of violence or the threat of violence against which so many women’s lives have played out across the centuries…Time bends as a misogynistic history plays out; Ophelia is everywhere.”
– Jennifer Saunders, Psaltery & Lyre
Official Book Trailer:
V.C. Myers Official Site 