Black Lawrence Press, 2024, 36 pp.
Opheliac, a poetry collection by Emma Sloan, was selected as a runner-up in the Black River Chapbook Competition. The collection, which reads almost like a short story, combines grief and mythology in an elegiac meditation on gender-based violence. It’s structured in three parts: the setting of the violence, its aftermath, and its prelude. What results is like a triptych portraying gender aggression in a banal, suburban, Middle-American town.
In the English, Pre-Raphaelite portraits of the drowned Ophelia, she is imagined as a mythical figure, almost a goddess, whose death appears glorified and romanticized. By reimagining Ophelia in Ohio—outside the mythical realm and close to home, where policies attack women and their bodies—Sloan brings the story closer to our collective reality; the femicide occurs in a familiar setting. Is this a warning sign for other girls and women? The gray flowers on the cover offer a somber delicateness to Ophelia’s situation, seemingly emulating those romanticized British paintings and perhaps pointing to the perception of femininity in our modern age as something both delicate and vulnerable to violence.
The collection begins with an instance of physical violence, in which Ophelia acts as an agent: “Ophelia claws her way up / through the duckweed again…” Perhaps this is an attempt to reclaim some of the violence done to her. The violence of her body is active, but the true culprits are run-of-the-mill teenage boys who have a sinister casualness about them. One of them, Eric, later murders her. “There are better things to look at / he says,” the opening poem continues, referring to her lifeless limbs in water, recalling “her dress hunched / on Eric’s basement floor.” His perception of Ophelia is of a crumpling body, whether that be her corpse floating in the waters or her clothes meek and silent on his floor.
We have a concrete town and concrete characterizations of violent men, but despite that, Ophelia alone exists as a mythic figure—a symbol of femininity. Does this poetic landscape condemn the men to their actions? Does it do the same to Ophelia?
In this narrative, agency emerges both as a desire and a precarious object. Who has agency over her story? With whose gaze are we seeing it? In the second poem, “Creation Myth,” Sloan imagines that “we managed to pour the dead girl / back into her body … that we pieced her back together / through photographs / through peonies / through our recollections and half-lies …” In doing so, she provides a focus on her that is unencumbered by the boys—the “we” here becomes an agent of creation, something godlike, something that attempts to give back a life lost.
This creative voice then begins to ground Ophelia’s existence into a physical, mundane world. “Ophelia on the bus. Ophelia in the back of the class / Ophelia’s hair dripping dogwood onto the road, onto the school sidewalk, onto the tiles / of the boys’ bathroom…” It attempts to give her an existence, a backstory—especially by contextualizing the night of her passing—with a tender voice. “She was plied with alcohol at a party and woke up more river / than girl.”
Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
The violence in this text is situated within the victim Ophelia’s softness. In “Hiraeth,” the reader gets a glimpse into an imagined or recalled conversation, in which Ophelia says, “I didn’t know he felt that way. Her voice is as soft / as a bubbling brook. Even after he held my head under, I still didn’t understand.” The softness of her voice resembles that of a sonorous river, perhaps the same body of water her corpse calls home.
What, then, is an Opheliac? Is this collection a meditation on the violence done unto women, or is it a reflection—like a river’s surface—of the tenderness required or expected of women at all times, even in death? Is the softness performative? If so, who is performing—the speaker or Ophelia herself?
“Girl Tongue” breaks the glass of this expectation. “No more breaking in the word sorry / no more faux smiles in the courtroom / no more no more no more no / more no more girl tongue, pry it out with nail clippers / flush it down the toilet like your childhood fish, sprout a / replacement that’s more cobra than garden snake.” The collection suddenly shifts from a contemplative, contextualizing voice to a commanding one: a note to women to shed their girl tongues, to dismember the softness associated with them.
The chapbook’s second section contemplates what seems to be the aftermath of her dying, with “bubblegum lips pop[ping] around / the latest slab of gossip” and “the crests on [the boys’ jerseys] / flashing crimson under the midday sun” in “Hay Fever Season.” The descriptions of the Ohio town and its residents feel generalized along gender binary lines, but I wonder if that was an intentional choice, meant to be satirical. Is the author trying to underscore the mythification of the tragic figure by describing her past surroundings in a similarly mythified way?
What role does myth play in gender violence—why mythify it at all? “Onomatology” asks this same question: “What are we left with after a myth / other than the name?” I’m not sure there is an answer.
In its third and final section, Sloan imagines Eric as a victim of his past, mapping out the landscape of interwoven cycles of abuse and trauma. The poem “Home” delves into Eric’s life. “In the dream Eric can’t talk about / the kitchen is carved in two / his father is pressing a gleaming knife edge / into his open palm, eyes marbled with liquor…” The poem concludes with Opehlia’s entrance into his life, which here seems to present a positive reality. “When he meets Ophelia / it feels like the chance / to build something new.”
I was perplexed by the nuance afforded to him in this passage, primarily because it reenacted abuse as inherited, but also because it shifted how readers were meant to approach him. It would be interesting to see this dynamic played out more in the text. Are we meant to pity him and his past? Surely that’s part of it, but ending the collection with his trauma almost undercuts Ophelia’s. How are we meant to contextualize Ophelia within Eric’s life? Is she a victim, or something else?
What role are we meant to give abusers? Can they be anything more than that?
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Rina Shamilov is a poet and visual artist from Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry explores self, grief, family, and movement, and she writes to preserve memory and feeling. She is a nonfiction editor at MAYDAY and a managing editor at the Notre Dame Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Foundationalist, Club Plum Lit, Mulberry Literary, Pink Disco, Udolpho, The Laurel Review, Kismet Magazine, Ranger, Heavy Feather Review, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. Her chapbook, My Mother’s Armoire, was recently published by Bottlecap Press. Several poems from her collection have received an honorable mention for the 2025 Billy Maich award at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She has written nonfiction pieces for Lilith, The Forward, and New Voices, where she serves as an arts and culture editor.
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