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Bellocq's Ophelia
Selected as a "2003 Notable Book" by the American Library Association
In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq's Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.
In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of Bellocq's Ophelia, her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.
48 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
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About the author
Natasha Trethewey
41 books784 followersNatasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 97 reviews
January 19, 2020
Natasha Trethewey is a former U.S. Poet laureate, a Pulitzer winner for Native Guard, and one of my favorite contemporary poets. I have decided to fill in the gaps with all of her earlier collections that I may have missed. Trethewey tends to mix poetry and prose in her work as she paints a picture of various facets of 19th century New Orleans. In Bellocq’s Ophelia, a short collection of under fifty pages, readers meet Ophelia, the name given to an octoroon who migrated from a rural farm to New Orleans in search of a better life for herself, yet finding a life with less opportunities than she set out for.
Ophelia settles in a negro brothel but is satisfied with her station in life because she is considered new and not a favored customer of most men there. She does pine for life with her mother and close friend and writes constant letters home. Outside of the brothel, Ophelia becomes the assistant of E.J. Bellocq, a gifted New Orleans photographer. Through her work with Bellocq, Trethewey exposes readers to the New Orleans of one hundred years ago, a city on the cusp of modernization and still a belle of the old south. Bellocq is determined for Ophelia to become more than just his assistant, which is why he sought her out at the brothel in the first place. The changing relationship is unbeknownst to Ophelia as her letters home reflect her growing love of photography as well as feelings of homesickness and hope that she can either return to the farm or that her family can visit her in New Orleans at an opportune time.
With poetry that readers like prose, Trethewey is one of the contemporary poets that changed the way I appreciated poetry. I appreciate a good story, so I favor Trethewey’s historical vignettes much more than what one would call traditional poetry. Bellocq’s Ophelia is an early collection of hers, one that required much research to piece together Ophelia’s otherwise forgotten life. In this volume, it is apparent that Trethewey was unpolished but on her way to becoming one of the top American poets today. She would win the Pulitzer half a decade later for Native Guard, which also evokes imagery of ante and post-bellum New Orleans. As there are still collections of Trethewey’s that I haven’t read yet, I have an inkling that I will be revisiting her work later this year.
3.75 stars
Ophelia settles in a negro brothel but is satisfied with her station in life because she is considered new and not a favored customer of most men there. She does pine for life with her mother and close friend and writes constant letters home. Outside of the brothel, Ophelia becomes the assistant of E.J. Bellocq, a gifted New Orleans photographer. Through her work with Bellocq, Trethewey exposes readers to the New Orleans of one hundred years ago, a city on the cusp of modernization and still a belle of the old south. Bellocq is determined for Ophelia to become more than just his assistant, which is why he sought her out at the brothel in the first place. The changing relationship is unbeknownst to Ophelia as her letters home reflect her growing love of photography as well as feelings of homesickness and hope that she can either return to the farm or that her family can visit her in New Orleans at an opportune time.
With poetry that readers like prose, Trethewey is one of the contemporary poets that changed the way I appreciated poetry. I appreciate a good story, so I favor Trethewey’s historical vignettes much more than what one would call traditional poetry. Bellocq’s Ophelia is an early collection of hers, one that required much research to piece together Ophelia’s otherwise forgotten life. In this volume, it is apparent that Trethewey was unpolished but on her way to becoming one of the top American poets today. She would win the Pulitzer half a decade later for Native Guard, which also evokes imagery of ante and post-bellum New Orleans. As there are still collections of Trethewey’s that I haven’t read yet, I have an inkling that I will be revisiting her work later this year.
3.75 stars
August 19, 2025
I’d previously read two other collections by Trethewey and loved them, but it took a book of essays, Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History, for me to hear of this one, her second collection, even though the setting is New Orleans. (That leaves only her first book, Domestic Work: Poems, for me to read one day.)
While Thrall remains my favorite of hers, this covers some of the same themes, including colorism, as the poet, inspired by the subjects of the Storyville photographer, E.J. Bellocq, imagines the life of one of the women. After reading certain poems, I looked at his photographs online and the woman Trethewey names Ophelia (and Violet in her Storyville life) has such a poignant face, I can understand why Trethewey was captivated by her.
While Thrall remains my favorite of hers, this covers some of the same themes, including colorism, as the poet, inspired by the subjects of the Storyville photographer, E.J. Bellocq, imagines the life of one of the women. After reading certain poems, I looked at his photographs online and the woman Trethewey names Ophelia (and Violet in her Storyville life) has such a poignant face, I can understand why Trethewey was captivated by her.
March 3, 2019
·EJ Bellocq, Storyville Portraits, c. 1910–1912
·Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, 2002
After reading Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, I wanted to see more of the EJ Bellocq photographs that inspired many of the scenes – and so much of the mood – of that novel. The portraits he took of Storyville prostitutes were found many years after his death, and many of them are damaged, but this somehow adds to their air of poignancy. It's remarkable how much feeling and personality is captured in these strange shots, which Bellocq took privately and never showed to anyone except a few close friends.
They hit us, now, through multiple layers of interpretation – all carefully posed and set up by Bellocq, never candid, and therefore making you constantly aware of how we see these women through a male gaze, however complex. Natasha Trethewey's second poetry collection attempts to give them back a voice – an imagined one, of course, and therefore not without its own problems, but even so it's quite a powerful and inspiring feat of creative energy.
It's possible to flick back and forth between her book of poems and a book of the photographs, and look for one-to-one matches – I certainly did, and many of the sonnets do represent little bursts of direct ecphrasis:
But many of them don't necessarily have direct correspondences in that way. Instead, they make up a sort of imagined biography of one (pick one) of the girls in a New Orleans ‘coloured’ brothel like Lula White's or Willie Piazza's in the second decade of the century – the letters home, the reflections on the different types of customer, the mixed feelings about posing for Bellocq.
In Trethewey's verse, these women are wry and articulate, thoughtful, analytical, well aware of their circumstances and opportunities. ‘I'm not so foolish / that I don't know this photograph that we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine,’ one says. How realistic it all is no one can say – certainly the faces in Bellocq's pictures suggest a variety of different responses and emotions whose range goes beyond even what can be captured in Trethewey's poems. Her writing sends you back to the photos, studying each subject anew, and thinking:
·Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia, 2002
I wear my best gown for the picture—
white silk with seed pearls and ostrich feathers—
my hair in a loose chignon. Behind me,
Bellocq's black scrum just covers the laundry—
tea towels, bleached and frayed, drying on the line.
I look away from his lens to appear
demure, to attract those guests not wanting
the lewd sights of Emma Johnson's circus.
Countess writes my description for the book—
“Violet,” a fair-skinned beauty, recites
poetry and soliloquies; nightly
she performs her tableau vivant, becomes
a living statue, an object of art—
and I fade again into someone I'm not.
After reading Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, I wanted to see more of the EJ Bellocq photographs that inspired many of the scenes – and so much of the mood – of that novel. The portraits he took of Storyville prostitutes were found many years after his death, and many of them are damaged, but this somehow adds to their air of poignancy. It's remarkable how much feeling and personality is captured in these strange shots, which Bellocq took privately and never showed to anyone except a few close friends.
They hit us, now, through multiple layers of interpretation – all carefully posed and set up by Bellocq, never candid, and therefore making you constantly aware of how we see these women through a male gaze, however complex. Natasha Trethewey's second poetry collection attempts to give them back a voice – an imagined one, of course, and therefore not without its own problems, but even so it's quite a powerful and inspiring feat of creative energy.
It's possible to flick back and forth between her book of poems and a book of the photographs, and look for one-to-one matches – I certainly did, and many of the sonnets do represent little bursts of direct ecphrasis:
I pose nude for this photograph, awkward,
one arm folded behind my back, the other
limp at my side. Seated, I raise my chin,
my back so straight I imagine the bones
separating in my spine, my neck lengthening
like evening shadows. When I see this plate
I try to recall what I was thinking—
how not to be exposed, though naked, how
to wear skin like a garment, seamless.
Bellocq thinks I'm right for the camera, keeps
coming to my room. These plates are fragile,
he says, showing me how easy it is
to shatter this image of myself, how
a quick scratch carves a scar across my chest.
But many of them don't necessarily have direct correspondences in that way. Instead, they make up a sort of imagined biography of one (pick one) of the girls in a New Orleans ‘coloured’ brothel like Lula White's or Willie Piazza's in the second decade of the century – the letters home, the reflections on the different types of customer, the mixed feelings about posing for Bellocq.
It troubles me to think that I am suited
for this work—spectacle and fetish—
a pale odalisque. But then I recall
my earliest training—childhood—how
my mother taught me to curtsy and be still
so that I might please a white man, my father.
For him I learned to shape my gestures,
practiced expressions on my pliant face.
I've learned the camera well—the danger
of it, the half-truths it can tell, but also
the way it fastens us to our pasts, makes grand
the unadorned moment.
In Trethewey's verse, these women are wry and articulate, thoughtful, analytical, well aware of their circumstances and opportunities. ‘I'm not so foolish / that I don't know this photograph that we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine,’ one says. How realistic it all is no one can say – certainly the faces in Bellocq's pictures suggest a variety of different responses and emotions whose range goes beyond even what can be captured in Trethewey's poems. Her writing sends you back to the photos, studying each subject anew, and thinking:
Imagine her a moment later—after
the flash, blinded—stepping out
of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life.
December 10, 2007
After reading a great essay on poets.org, I discovered a book called Bellocq's Ophelia written by Natasha Trethewey. It's a series of poems written as letters from a Storyville prostitute to her girlhood friend, now a schoolmarm in their rural hometown. Ophelia is black, but can pass. The letters reveal her path to the brothel and how she endures her time there. Trethewey meditates on "the gaze," those who wield it and those subject to it. At first, Ophelia is just a possession/thing to be looked at and be looked through. After her encounters with Bellocq, we see her reclaim her own gaze, her own "looking," and develop her skill of seeing through photography.
Trethewey creating not only a poem, but a biography, that was framed by a previous work of art is fascinating to me. I recently heard someone describe historians as people who want to know about the unnamed, unmentioned and overlooked characters in the history books. I think artists pursue these questions as well, but instead of collecting facts, they dig for visual evidence (discovered or constructed).
Reading her poems, you will gain insight on what existence is like for "the other." You will recognize or begin to glean what it is like to be viewed with an assigned identity, not necessarily your own. And, what it's like for "the other" to walk with the included when the ability to blend in puts them--the included--at ease. The anxiety of waiting for them to finally notice your difference, and watching the behaviour perceptibly shift. Or, the included stumble over their prejudice, and "the other" speaks up and makes them aware the target is in their presence.
Trethewey creating not only a poem, but a biography, that was framed by a previous work of art is fascinating to me. I recently heard someone describe historians as people who want to know about the unnamed, unmentioned and overlooked characters in the history books. I think artists pursue these questions as well, but instead of collecting facts, they dig for visual evidence (discovered or constructed).
Reading her poems, you will gain insight on what existence is like for "the other." You will recognize or begin to glean what it is like to be viewed with an assigned identity, not necessarily your own. And, what it's like for "the other" to walk with the included when the ability to blend in puts them--the included--at ease. The anxiety of waiting for them to finally notice your difference, and watching the behaviour perceptibly shift. Or, the included stumble over their prejudice, and "the other" speaks up and makes them aware the target is in their presence.
September 20, 2012
Upon hearing that Natasha Trethewey had been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, I re-read my copy of "Bellocq's Ophelia." I encourage anyone who celebrates Ms. Trethewey's recent national honor to consider this book as her Ars Poetica of the year 2002 (and perhaps of the year 2012 as well). The book is just as much an investigation into the art of poetry as it is an investigation into the art of photography: When is a photograph (a poem) beautiful? when is it ugly? When is photography (poetry) a tool of freedom? when is it a weapon of enslavement? When is a photographer (a poet) made compassionate through a steady, attentive vision? when is he/she made abusive through corrupt power, through voyeurism? What happens when the passive subject of a photograph or a poem eventually seizes and wields that same camera (pen)? In this book, Ms. Trethewey maintains her own steady, attentive, and compassionate vision as she takes her own penetrating snapshots, as she takes verses from many different angles and lenses: epistolary and ekphrastic poems, a sonnet sequence, haiku-like 5/7/5 syllabics, dramatic monologues, and a variety of stanzas posing with the formal regularity of 2 lines, or 3 lines, or 4,6,7,8,11 lines. The result is, indeed, a beautiful and many-faceted book, and a tool of freedom, and a strong claim to equality -- everything admirable that we would expect from a Poet Laureate. Congratulations, Ms. Trethewey, and thank you.
October 27, 2024
"I know now that if we choose to keep any part of what is behind us, we must take all of it, hold each moment up to the light like a photograph." -"October 1911"
I enjoyed this epistolary poetry collection, which was told in the first person. Ophelia is a young, fair-skinned, mixed-race, Black woman who becomes a prostitute in New Orleans in the early 1900s. She is then photographed by E. J. Bellocq, opening her up to new opportunities. The poems are powerful and beautifully written, about history, women's agency, and race.
I enjoyed this epistolary poetry collection, which was told in the first person. Ophelia is a young, fair-skinned, mixed-race, Black woman who becomes a prostitute in New Orleans in the early 1900s. She is then photographed by E. J. Bellocq, opening her up to new opportunities. The poems are powerful and beautifully written, about history, women's agency, and race.
March 24, 2011
Letter Home
-New Orleans, November 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of now work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes, calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position. Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted - no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse things.
I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet
industry, to mask the desperation that tightens
my throat. I sit watching-
though I pretend not to notice - the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown
as your dear face, they'd know I'm not quite
what I pretend to b. I walk these streets
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,
a negress again. There are enough things here
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the wash pots
and irons of the laundresses call to me. Here,
I thought not to do the work I once did, back-bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift - even those half days
at picking time, listening to Miss J -. How
I'd come to know words, the recitations I practiced to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling u
or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until
I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,
I repeated whole sections I'd learned by heart,
spelling each wordin my head to make a picture
I could see, as well as a weight I could feel
in my mouth. So now, even as I write this
and think of you at home, Good-bye
is the waving map of your palm, is
a stone on my tongue.
-New Orleans, November 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of now work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes, calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position. Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted - no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse things.
I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet
industry, to mask the desperation that tightens
my throat. I sit watching-
though I pretend not to notice - the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown
as your dear face, they'd know I'm not quite
what I pretend to b. I walk these streets
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,
a negress again. There are enough things here
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the wash pots
and irons of the laundresses call to me. Here,
I thought not to do the work I once did, back-bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift - even those half days
at picking time, listening to Miss J -. How
I'd come to know words, the recitations I practiced to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling u
or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until
I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,
I repeated whole sections I'd learned by heart,
spelling each wordin my head to make a picture
I could see, as well as a weight I could feel
in my mouth. So now, even as I write this
and think of you at home, Good-bye
is the waving map of your palm, is
a stone on my tongue.
March 7, 2021
An absolutely brilliant, startling collection of poetry imagining the interior life of an unnamed, real woman who made a living as a sex worker and was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in New Orleans in the early 20th century. Originally published in 2002, this collection offers a breathtaking example of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” or the fictive filling-in-the-blanks of people on the margins whose lives were not well recorded, or not seen as worthy of record. (It’s a theoretical approach & concept that I am still learning about.)
Some of the poems in the collection stopped me in my tracks. “March 1911” imagines the unnamed woman (who Trethewey names Ophelia in this collection) hearing news of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster:
“The place they worked, locked up tight, / became a tomb. I live where I work. Will I die here / too? I read that some chose a last moment of flight, / leaping nine stories to their deaths. Others stayed / inside, perhaps to be burned clean / in the fire’s embrace, to rise again through the flames.”
The poetry is unbelievable, the imagined life so full. And acknowledgement is paid to the inequities and insults at play even in this work: that “Ophelia” may only be known to exist by record of some irrelevant man who photographed her a few times, that her anonymity makes this collection titled “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” an unearned possessive relationship. In the poem “Bellocq,” she muses: “I’m not so foolish / that I don’t know this photograph we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.”
Though it was only her second published collection, this is an absolute masterpiece from Trethewey as far as I am concerned. Endlessly rich.
Some of the poems in the collection stopped me in my tracks. “March 1911” imagines the unnamed woman (who Trethewey names Ophelia in this collection) hearing news of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster:
“The place they worked, locked up tight, / became a tomb. I live where I work. Will I die here / too? I read that some chose a last moment of flight, / leaping nine stories to their deaths. Others stayed / inside, perhaps to be burned clean / in the fire’s embrace, to rise again through the flames.”
The poetry is unbelievable, the imagined life so full. And acknowledgement is paid to the inequities and insults at play even in this work: that “Ophelia” may only be known to exist by record of some irrelevant man who photographed her a few times, that her anonymity makes this collection titled “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” an unearned possessive relationship. In the poem “Bellocq,” she muses: “I’m not so foolish / that I don’t know this photograph we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.”
Though it was only her second published collection, this is an absolute masterpiece from Trethewey as far as I am concerned. Endlessly rich.
October 20, 2023
So absolutely haunting and wonderful. What an amazing collection. I loved Trethewey's writing and the way she floods it with beautiful and fresh images that represent what identity means. She plays a lot with "whats in a name" and what identity is to a woman, especially a woman of color, and how she is regaining in and trying to figure it out.
Really amazing collection that turned into more of a biographical portrait from Ophelia's perspective.
Really amazing collection that turned into more of a biographical portrait from Ophelia's perspective.
November 22, 2024
didn't move me as much as other poems by trethewey :(
December 1, 2023
Okuduğum en iyi şiir kitaplarından biriydi. Her ne kadar Natasha Trethewey’e bu eseri için çok fazla teori gözünden bakıyor eleştirisi yapılsa da (ki bu kendinin de değindiği bir nokta) bence bu şiiri okurken insana rahatsız edici şekilde batmıyor, ya ben çok cahilim mfkvkfmvmfmf
October 24, 2017
What a beautiful and powerful book. Like the movie Pretty Baby in verse.
March 6, 2019
Although ‘Bellocq’s Ophelia’ is an epistolary book - flowing with personal letters to a friend, a teacher, or maybe to Ophelia from herself - we still feel a tension of her voice’s freedom. Throughout the diary pages of poems, we find many images of “her lips poised to open, to speak.” In the act “before speech, before the word comes out,” Ophelia’s lips begin to open, but “more coins fall / from my mouth, and I can’t cry out / or say what I want.” This silence speaks to the act of photography, the historical act of white photographers capturing black and brown folks in photographs.
This grayness follows Ophelia everywhere. We see New Orleans in “a dull palette of gray”, flooding in summers with gray skies, gray rats and insects swarming into “the gray husk of winter.” The camera itself produces a gray image: “gray as stone or steel, lifeless, flat.” And the woman, a mixture of white and black, becomes gray and varied. Trethewey re-sees Ophelia 100 times in this book. She is multiplied in the mirrors, in the photography of Bellocq, but this white gaze can never solve her body or life. Through Ophelia’s deepest thoughts and scenic mundane routes of 1900s New Orleans, we gain access into her complicated identities - a woman of color, a sex-worker, an invisible black woman. This book resists the spectacle of oppressed bodies.
This grayness follows Ophelia everywhere. We see New Orleans in “a dull palette of gray”, flooding in summers with gray skies, gray rats and insects swarming into “the gray husk of winter.” The camera itself produces a gray image: “gray as stone or steel, lifeless, flat.” And the woman, a mixture of white and black, becomes gray and varied. Trethewey re-sees Ophelia 100 times in this book. She is multiplied in the mirrors, in the photography of Bellocq, but this white gaze can never solve her body or life. Through Ophelia’s deepest thoughts and scenic mundane routes of 1900s New Orleans, we gain access into her complicated identities - a woman of color, a sex-worker, an invisible black woman. This book resists the spectacle of oppressed bodies.
December 20, 2017
Inspired by the photography of E. J. Bellocq, who photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey has written poems that are both plaintive yet possess a touch of defiance. Patterned after William Shakespeare's character in the play Hamlet, the Ophelia presented in these poems, some of which have a sequential tone to the events portrayed, she is powerless to define her life as it at the mercy of men, her race and the times in which she lives. The two main characters aside from Ophelia are her white father from whom she longs for attention and acceptance, and the Madam of the brothel she comes to work in mainly so that she can have a place to live and food to eat. Particularly resonant are the poems, "Portrait of a Bawd drinking Raleigh Rye, "Countess P's Advice for New Girls" and "Vignette". Highly Recommended.
January 5, 2008
This book launched my interest on the ekphrastic tradition in narrative voice. This book resonates on so many levels - the craft of the writing itself, the male gaze, autobiography, social issues past and present. I love it!
July 2, 2024
Ooooh, this was good. Hauntingly beautiful, just like its muse. I’ve been fascinated with the Storyville portraits for so long and Trethewey has instantly made me see them in a new light, something I hadn’t thought possible before finishing this one.
Read
October 31, 2020"I know now that if we choose // to keep any part of what is behind us, / we must take all of it" --October 1911
"I've learned the camera well--the danger / of it, the half-truths it can tell, but also / the way it fastens us to our pasts, makes grand / the unadorned moment." --December 1911
"I've learned the camera well--the danger / of it, the half-truths it can tell, but also / the way it fastens us to our pasts, makes grand / the unadorned moment." --December 1911
July 22, 2023
Absolutely fascinating story!
December 18, 2025
Tretheway is the blueprint for ekphrastic poetry!! She has such a knack for building a world using richh verses while empowering and humanizing women often forgotten to time. Lots of great commentary on identity, the male gaze, resilience, and trying to forgive/find oneself as well.
December 10, 2014
A little over 100 years ago, EJ Bellocq took a series of photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans. Natasha Trethewey saw the old photos and fashioned this fictional "biographical" book of poems around one of the women, the Ophelia of the title and on the cover, an Ophelia who chose to live.
Most of the poems are Ophelia's letters home telling of her life. What comes through is a story of non-judgmental survival, a woman doing what she must and coming to terms with it for various reasons, one of which is a job well done. Ophelia's is a life worth knowing about.
The poems are written in a variety of styles, which demonstrates Trethewey's versatility with forms. Most in the third part of the book are sonnets, if fourteen line non-rhyming verse of mostly ten syllable lines may be so-called. The sonnet is known as the style for love poems. These are about love of a different shade, and I do not mean sexual. That showed me something.
I can't say that this book grabbed me the way that Trethewey's NATIVE GUARD still holds me, but I can't think of a book of poetry read this year that I hold in higher regard. I have no doubt that a second reading will make it seem even richer.
Most of the poems are Ophelia's letters home telling of her life. What comes through is a story of non-judgmental survival, a woman doing what she must and coming to terms with it for various reasons, one of which is a job well done. Ophelia's is a life worth knowing about.
The poems are written in a variety of styles, which demonstrates Trethewey's versatility with forms. Most in the third part of the book are sonnets, if fourteen line non-rhyming verse of mostly ten syllable lines may be so-called. The sonnet is known as the style for love poems. These are about love of a different shade, and I do not mean sexual. That showed me something.
I can't say that this book grabbed me the way that Trethewey's NATIVE GUARD still holds me, but I can't think of a book of poetry read this year that I hold in higher regard. I have no doubt that a second reading will make it seem even richer.
January 3, 2014
This is another collection of ekphrastic poetry by Trethewey, based on Bellocq’s photos from the red light district of New Orleans in the early 20th century. The narrator is an octoroon, a black woman light enough to almost pass as white who couldn’t find any other way to support herself. She’s pragmatic, sometimes a bit defiant in justifying her choice, but we feel her pain and the injustice of her life in these moving poems, often written as letters. This was my favorite of her collections to date.
November 10, 2025
Trethewey's Ophelia
Storyville was a notorious red light district in New Orleans from 1898 through 1917 when it closed under pressure from the military. It has often been portrayed in novels such as Nelson Algren's "Walk on the Wild Side"and Lois Battle's "Storyville" and in films including "Pretty Baby" which features a young Storyville prostitute and the photographer E.J. Bellocq.
Bellocq (1873 -- 1949) was an obscure commercial phootographer who around 1912 made a series of photographs of the prostitutes of Storyville that have since become famous. Bellocq's Storyville portraits were feature at an exhibition at the Musuem of Modern Art in 1970 and subsequently were published in two large art books. The photos are now readily accessible on the internet. Bellocq gained the women's trust and captured something of their character, their elusiveness and their surroundings in his photographs.
Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007 and served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate from 2012 --2014. In 2013 she published a short collection of poetry "Bellocq's Ophelia" which offers her own reflections on Bellocq's photos and on the women of Storyville. I was moved to seek out the collection due to my long fascination with the subject.
Trethewey describes Ophelia as "the imagined name of a prostitute" photographed by Bellocq and as "a very white-skinned black woman -- mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon" who would have lived in one of the few Storyville brothels that included black women. The book tells the story of Ophelia's life, largely in her own words, woven in with allusions to, among others, Walt Whitman and the painter John Everett Millais (1829 -- 1896) and his famous painting "Ophelia" (1851) portraying Shakespeare's character lying on her back, singing, before she drowns herself in a river.
Trethewey divides her book of under 50 pages into four sections. An introductory poem "Bellocq's Ophelia" draws parallels between the Storyville Ophelia and Millais' Ophelia. Section I of the book consists of a single poem, "Letter Home" in which Opelia writes to Constance, her friend and teacher from the town of Oakville, Mississippi, describing her leaving home for New Orleans, and her futile efforts to find work before landing in the brothel. Ophelia writes to her friend about her experience throughout the book.
Part II begins with Countess P's "Advice to New Girls" in which she advises Ophelia to blot out her thoughts and her individuality to become each of her many clients want her to be. This is followed by a series of letters from Ophelia to Constance describing her life in the brothel. "Please do not think I am the wayward girl you describe", she writes. "I alone have made this choice. Save what I pay for board, what I earn is mine." She asks her friend not to judge but to "help me only/as you already do -- with the words/ I crave, with the mundane details/of your quiet life." She describes to Constance how she has been photographed by "a man named Bellocq". She writes "Now I face the camera, wait/for the photograph to show me who I am."
Part IIi of the book opens with a short series of poems titled "Storyville Diary" as Ophelia remembers her early life in Oakville and her relationship to her white father. Her name at the brothel is "Violet". Ophelia discusses her growing relationship with Bellocq and her own budding interest in the art of photography. The poems describe several of Bellocq's photos and the ways they capture and the ways they miss the interior character of Ophelia. As she reflects on Bellocq's photographs, Ophelia writes:
"I follow him now, watch him take pictures.
I look at what he can see through his lens
and what he cannot -- sliverfish behind
the walls, the yellow tint of a faded bruise --
other things here, what the camera misses."
The final poem in the collection "Vignette" describes a group portrait of women, with a woman, after the conclusion of the photography session "stepping out/of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life."
Trethewey's poems are highly reflective and introspective. They are accessibly written with a mix of free verse and traditional poetic forms, especially the sonnet. The poems offer Trethewey's own response to Ophelia, the women of Storyville and to Bellocq. I enjoyed this imaginative visit to Storyville with Trethewey.
Robin Friedman
Storyville was a notorious red light district in New Orleans from 1898 through 1917 when it closed under pressure from the military. It has often been portrayed in novels such as Nelson Algren's "Walk on the Wild Side"and Lois Battle's "Storyville" and in films including "Pretty Baby" which features a young Storyville prostitute and the photographer E.J. Bellocq.
Bellocq (1873 -- 1949) was an obscure commercial phootographer who around 1912 made a series of photographs of the prostitutes of Storyville that have since become famous. Bellocq's Storyville portraits were feature at an exhibition at the Musuem of Modern Art in 1970 and subsequently were published in two large art books. The photos are now readily accessible on the internet. Bellocq gained the women's trust and captured something of their character, their elusiveness and their surroundings in his photographs.
Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007 and served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate from 2012 --2014. In 2013 she published a short collection of poetry "Bellocq's Ophelia" which offers her own reflections on Bellocq's photos and on the women of Storyville. I was moved to seek out the collection due to my long fascination with the subject.
Trethewey describes Ophelia as "the imagined name of a prostitute" photographed by Bellocq and as "a very white-skinned black woman -- mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon" who would have lived in one of the few Storyville brothels that included black women. The book tells the story of Ophelia's life, largely in her own words, woven in with allusions to, among others, Walt Whitman and the painter John Everett Millais (1829 -- 1896) and his famous painting "Ophelia" (1851) portraying Shakespeare's character lying on her back, singing, before she drowns herself in a river.
Trethewey divides her book of under 50 pages into four sections. An introductory poem "Bellocq's Ophelia" draws parallels between the Storyville Ophelia and Millais' Ophelia. Section I of the book consists of a single poem, "Letter Home" in which Opelia writes to Constance, her friend and teacher from the town of Oakville, Mississippi, describing her leaving home for New Orleans, and her futile efforts to find work before landing in the brothel. Ophelia writes to her friend about her experience throughout the book.
Part II begins with Countess P's "Advice to New Girls" in which she advises Ophelia to blot out her thoughts and her individuality to become each of her many clients want her to be. This is followed by a series of letters from Ophelia to Constance describing her life in the brothel. "Please do not think I am the wayward girl you describe", she writes. "I alone have made this choice. Save what I pay for board, what I earn is mine." She asks her friend not to judge but to "help me only/as you already do -- with the words/ I crave, with the mundane details/of your quiet life." She describes to Constance how she has been photographed by "a man named Bellocq". She writes "Now I face the camera, wait/for the photograph to show me who I am."
Part IIi of the book opens with a short series of poems titled "Storyville Diary" as Ophelia remembers her early life in Oakville and her relationship to her white father. Her name at the brothel is "Violet". Ophelia discusses her growing relationship with Bellocq and her own budding interest in the art of photography. The poems describe several of Bellocq's photos and the ways they capture and the ways they miss the interior character of Ophelia. As she reflects on Bellocq's photographs, Ophelia writes:
"I follow him now, watch him take pictures.
I look at what he can see through his lens
and what he cannot -- sliverfish behind
the walls, the yellow tint of a faded bruise --
other things here, what the camera misses."
The final poem in the collection "Vignette" describes a group portrait of women, with a woman, after the conclusion of the photography session "stepping out/of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life."
Trethewey's poems are highly reflective and introspective. They are accessibly written with a mix of free verse and traditional poetic forms, especially the sonnet. The poems offer Trethewey's own response to Ophelia, the women of Storyville and to Bellocq. I enjoyed this imaginative visit to Storyville with Trethewey.
Robin Friedman
August 13, 2021
12/31
Natasha Trethewey is pretty damn amazing, and she doesn't need me or anyone else to say that. This collection is clearly a project of love. She uses E.J. Bellocq's photographs of the Storybrook district in New Orleans at the turn of the century to imagine, resurrect, and set to page the life of a young prostitute whose mother is black and father is white. I love that Tretheway allows this Ophelia to turn the gaze, both inward at a private self that Bellocq could have never accessed and outward at us the reader, decades and decades later. Only complaint, the collection is too short.
#SealeyChallenge #NathashaTretheway
From "Letter Home"
--New Orleans, November 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted--no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.
https://poets.org/poem/letter-home
Natasha Trethewey is pretty damn amazing, and she doesn't need me or anyone else to say that. This collection is clearly a project of love. She uses E.J. Bellocq's photographs of the Storybrook district in New Orleans at the turn of the century to imagine, resurrect, and set to page the life of a young prostitute whose mother is black and father is white. I love that Tretheway allows this Ophelia to turn the gaze, both inward at a private self that Bellocq could have never accessed and outward at us the reader, decades and decades later. Only complaint, the collection is too short.
#SealeyChallenge #NathashaTretheway
From "Letter Home"
--New Orleans, November 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted--no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.
https://poets.org/poem/letter-home
November 27, 2023
I chose this book out of a little, wooden neighborhood library, and did not know what to expect. I love poetry and am always on the lookout for new poets to read. This book blew me away. The poems, often reading more like prose, are beautiful and sad and painful, especially read in aggregate in this book. I learned about something I wasn't really aware had happened, but also was not surprised by in the slightest. It's just one more facet of the terrible facts around race in the US, even well post-Civil War. And of course, the ever-present painful plight of women, especially those forced by circumstance into the so-called oldest profession (wouldn't that really be hunting and gathering? anyway...) and how society treats them in return, including their own customers, as if one is somehow more deserving of blame and shame than the other when both did the deed, and one is anyway forced into doing so while the other chooses and pays to do so. Hmmm...right, it's the women who are doing something wrong. Riiiiiiight. For some reason, this topic, covered succinctly in one poem that made me very sad, really struck a nerve. Read it to find out. :-)
December 19, 2023
Natasha Trethewey's second volume of poetry tells readers the story of a light-skinned Black woman who travels to New Orleans in the second decade of the twentieth century, earnestly hoping to earn a living wage by being able to pass as white in the big city; when that fails, she reluctantly finds that her youth and beauty give her value as a sex worker, and otherwise she has no value at all. Ophelia chooses to survive, eventually becoming a favorite model for the famous photographer Bellocq. But Ophelia is more than a model, part of a still life; she is an artistic collaborator, a co-creator in the making of art, even though (as Ophelia ruefully observes) "I'm not so foolish/ that I don't know this photograph WE make/ will bear the stamp of his name, not mine . . . ." ("Bellocq," page 39).
Haunting, provocative, and eloquent; Trethewey raises questions that make this collection linger in your memory.
Haunting, provocative, and eloquent; Trethewey raises questions that make this collection linger in your memory.
December 31, 2020
Here, I am to look casual, even
frowsy, though still queen of my boudoir.
A moment caught as if by accident—
pictures crooked on the walls, newspaper
sprawled on the dresser, a bit of pale silk
spilling from a drawer, and my slip pulled
below my white shoulders, décolleté,
black stockings, legs crossed easy as a man's.
All of it contrived except for the way
the flowered walls dominate the backdrop
and close in on me as I pose, my hand
at rest on my knee, a single finger
raised, arching toward the camera—a gesture
before speech, before the first word comes out.
October 11, 2023
really amazing collection!! an ekphrastic character study that speculates on a couple years in the life of one of e.j. bellocq’s portrait subjects in the red light district of 1910s new orleans, at times it barely feels like poetry and more like someone’s unedited journal. splitting it into letters and diaries and dating all the entries means you can have a great time reading all the exteriority, the interiority, or free jazzing it and getting both perspectives on a given month at once. short and sweet enough to knock out in an hour if you’re wrapped up in it (and u will be!)
January 24, 2019
I read this in about an hour while cooking breakfast, which may imply that it’s slight, but there is this to consider: I picked this up because I remember reading excerpts from it in a Southern Women Writers class in college five years ago, and a conversation in my graduate Southern Lit. class pushed me to seek it out and read the whole thing. So yes, it’s a quick read, but let me tell you, it lingers.
February 13, 2025
3.5 Stars is my real rating.
"Mornings such as these, I walk
among the weary, their eyes sunken
as if each body, diseased and dying,
would pull itself inside, back to the shining
center."
This book was beautiful! I loved how it gave life and connected to Bellocq's real portraits of sex workers. I applaud Trethaway for applying the female experience to these images and her poetry is beautiful and very uniquely done in the form of letters, free-verse, and sonnets alike.
"Mornings such as these, I walk
among the weary, their eyes sunken
as if each body, diseased and dying,
would pull itself inside, back to the shining
center."
This book was beautiful! I loved how it gave life and connected to Bellocq's real portraits of sex workers. I applaud Trethaway for applying the female experience to these images and her poetry is beautiful and very uniquely done in the form of letters, free-verse, and sonnets alike.
July 14, 2017
What are two of the things I have obsessed over in recent months? Ophelia and New Orleans (beefing up my Hurricane Katrina unit.) And what is this book about? A prostitute named Ophelia who lives in New Orleans! This is more a chapbook than a full-length, and I think I would have liked it better if I'd just spent one afternoon reading it as a whole. Lovely, but possibly a bit thin.
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