In Exit the Body, Heather Bartel makes an offering-as-essay-collection, if a collection of essays can include a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath through a mirror, and letters to a living ghost.
Like journeying through the hallways of a haunted house, Bartel moves through a narrative landscape that shape-shifts, engaging in conversation with the women who haunt her to ask the question at the core of Exit the Body: what to do with an obsession with the mirror when the person in the mirror is either the only person you can trust or the one who is trying to kill you.
A dance with illusion and choice, Exit the Body is a meditation on the mind and its place within the body: what escapes, what ruptures, what is created, what echoes, and where we find ourselves on the other side.
Praise for Exit the Body:
"Wandering yet resolute, the mood in these occult essays, with their travels through alienation and image-cathexis, is ambitious, unflinching, daring, searching and intelligently sound. Feeling anew what she has felt fueled by in Earhart's legend, staring down the strives of Plath's turns of mind, looking through the glass at a chorus of Lynch actresses-iconic channels of realms sublime-I admire this writer much and feel a sisterly kinship within struggles to love, to hold, to expand to live more...in commitment to the sensorium of thought."
-Douglas A. Martin, author of Wolf and Outline of My Lover
"A lyric debut, Exit the Body is true to its title, tackling female grief while blurring the lines between reality and dreams. Using mirrors, fever, fire, and ghosts, Heather Bartel contemplates women at the edge of madness. The result is a fluid essay collection built on visceral vignettes."
-Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender
"'Every waking moment is an act of imagination, ' writes Heather Bartel in her debut essay collection Exit the Body. Like an echo thrown backward against the mirror of time, these essays occupy the liminal space of the body moving across the landscape of becoming. Otherworldly, shapeshifting, and pierced through with longing, Bartel summons loss, death, rage, literary ghosts, Tarot, wildfires, and murmurs from beyond the grave. The text becomes 'a body a landscape of days spent searching, attempting to map out a meaning for itself in the world, a meaning and a home.' The experience is one of liberation; a resurrection that sets us free. The feminine text is a calling forth of the body, from the body, it's an act of creation, decreation, and incantation, and this is the art and magic of Bartel's work in Exit the Body."
-Emily Arnason Casey, author of Made Holy
"Heather Bartel's Exit the Body combines parallels between universes of lyric essays and divinations for the dead to identify ideas of self, illusions, empowerment, obsession, and radiance. Finding glimmers within worlds where words focus on makebelieve and magick, tethered ghost-sister, dear ghost sister, a ghost a ghost a ghost a ghost. Bartel uses the lyric essay as spellwork to manifest bodies, to manifest narratives, to manifest all the goodbyes we can no longer hold: Where she asks, now, you choose. You choose."
-Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura