I have just finished reading Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia. This is a slim volume containing 28 poems, a cohesive series that seems just the right length for a chapbook but is presented in a very attractive collection. The book's premise, the poet wrote ekphrastic poems based on the portraits of E.J. Bellocq, a photographer in the early 20th century who photographed the prostitutes working in Storyville, the red light district in New Orleans. One of Bellocq's models was a light-skinned African American who is known in this collection as Ophelia. The poems in this book contemplate Ophelia's life, how she was lured into the house of Countess P and subsequently exploited for her exoticness. There is a section of epistolary poems written from Ophelia's perspective, and a sonnet sequence that closes out the book. The variety of form and narrative, flashbacks into Ophelia's life before Storyville, sustains the book and makes it compelling read.

For more on Bellocq and the Storyville portraits, check out this page. Bellocq's photographs were not known or recognized until well after his death, when the negatives passed into the hands of photographer Lee Friedlander who printed Bellocq's original images and exhibited them.

Now reading Margaret Gibson's Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, another interesting collection of ekphrastic meditations on a historical figure.