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Exit the Body: Essays
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.
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.
- GenresEssays
52 pages, Paperback
Published May 14, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 14, 2024
Read this book because I love tarot and Sylvia Plath and creative nonfiction. These are amazing and unique and I can’t wait to hear the author read and answer questions at the author’s book launch tonight!
May 21, 2024
"Summons" is a verb on the back of the book, and that seems the truest way to put my thumbprint on it, on the cold window glass, the heat leaving a mark that dissipates: this is a summoning, or an "unbecoming" ("Trajectories") of "a woman who is or is not Laura Palmer" ("Yet the Phantom Was Part of the Flower"). It is the missing tarot card, a reflection, a knife. You can read my favorite quotes I pulled on Medium. You can read the book. As with poetry, Exit is something to be experienced but not summed up. Summoned up but not summed. It questions realness and unmakes. It points at life with one thumb and at death with the other.
August 7, 2024
Don't miss this innovative debut essay collection that explores obsession and Sylvia Plath!
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.
Blurbed by Douglas A. Martin, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Hillary Leftwich, and Emily Arnason Casey, who says, "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."
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.
Blurbed by Douglas A. Martin, Deborah Jackson Taffa, Hillary Leftwich, and Emily Arnason Casey, who says, "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."
October 25, 2024
Brilliantly innovative- this collection gave me goosebumps. Heather Bartel’s essays play with form and language in a way that enhances meaning and emotion throughout. I’ll never read Plath’s work the same way again, or without Bartel’s work as a companion.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews