REVIEW: Exit the Body by Heather Bartel

Reviewed by Dorothy Rice

In Exit the Body (Split Lip Press; 2024), Heather Bartel presents nine provocative, mind-bending, genre-fluid essays on the nature of identity, personhood, womanhood, reality, time, space, pain, grief, and more. It would be difficult to identify aspects of the human condition that aren’t in some way touched, or glanced upon, by these divergent pieces.

In exploring her subjects, Bartel makes use of unexpected references to the lives and work (including the use of lifted text in some instances, with detailed citations at the end of the book) of both historical and contemporary figures and cultural icons—including such seemingly disparate figures as Amelia Earhart, Sylvia Plath and the filmmaker David Lynch. She weaves these “real” people into her storytelling, including them as characters, using what is known and documented about their lives, and the body of work or record they have left behind, as touchstones from which she launches boldly into the territory of imagination, divination, speculation, particularly regarding matters where the “truth” can never be known with any degree of certainty.

Such is the case with the collection’s opening essay, “Yet the Phantom Was Part of the Flower.”

“My first fascination was Amelia Earhart—tethered ghost sister, cross-generational friend. I didn’t give a dam about aviation. I only cared that the end of her life was shaky, only cared about the chorus of words spread through every book: woman, disappeared, died. My admiration for her bloomed out of these seeds of possibility, out of a romantic notion; perhaps she had discovered how to become a ghost while she was still alive.”

Bartel poses similar or perhaps related, tangential questions in circling, cycling, cyclical ways, coming back round to them again and again. Like a scientist, she faces and interrogates her subjects backwards, front ways, sideways, from the top and bottom, in the mirror, from beyond the mirror, and beyond the grave. Always questioning, reappraising what is real, imagined, a figment, a fragment, a chimera, an illusion, dreamt, remembered. Overall, the effect is at times beguiling, seductive, surreal, mind-bending.

In “The Knife Speaks: a tarot reading with Sylvia Plath and a shot of whiskey” she writes:

“Awareness has neither a center nor boundaries. Awareness is a house at night with the lights turned off, awareness is a mirror, there is always a mirror and I see from both sides. Every choice is an illusion and with each choice I risk an opening, like a star that punctures the night. A star is a shaped thing, and it is a word, when it’s written; a word is a voice is a light. I am her echo. The reflection of my face is never enough. I look again and return to the beginning, an offering: you choose now, you choose.”

Another essay (“Letters to a Living Ghost”) takes the form of a letter to a ghost sister. Yet another (“Self-Practice: Coven”) is a play with three women, one of them the ghost of Sylvia Plath. “Self Practice” is comprised solely of a long paragraph listing words, all beginning with the word “self” (i.e. self-abasement, self-absorption, self-denial).

Throughout these nine essays, one senses a fascination with the nature and physical, psychic, emotional boundaries of being, of earthly beingness, and by natural extension, of death, and where the liminal line between the two is drawn or to be found and if in fact, this is something concrete, factual and fixed or more fluid and ephemeral, ghost-like, shapeshifting and haunting in its possibilities and parameters.

Some of the essays are more accessible than others, their meaning seemingly more transparent. Others may require multiple readings to reveal themselves. In all cases, there are layers, with words and form used to multiple, often illusory, almost always lyric effect. For example, this excerpt of “The Phantom Was Part of the Flower”:

“It is the possibility of otherness, of disappearing into a dream, of going to ghost, that the transformation could occur without our compliance or even without our noticing—this possibility is what haunts me when I see these women scream, when I am the one screaming, when all I see behind my eyes is white and I do not recognize what lies in front of me, what should be irrevocable, familiar, concrete.”

Exit the Body is an intriguing, challenging collection of sensuous essays for anyone interested in the possibilities for the genre, be that genre lyric essay, memoir, memoir in essays, or women’s studies and literature.