A Review of Heather Bartel’s Exit the Body
Surreal Explorations of the Embodied Self: A Review of Heather Bartel’s Exit the Body by Madison Bowles
The new essay collection, Exit the Body (Split/Lip, 2024), from Heather Bartel is a surreal exploration of the intersections between grief and the body. As the writer phrases it, “Death is the only story I know, my body the process.” These essays, which range from a letter to a living ghost, to a one-act play featuring a cast of dead and imaginary women, is an enthralling and unique reading experience.
Bartel is founder and editor of the literary journal and community, The Champagne Room. She’s a graduate of Webster University and Goddard College. Her writing appears in MAYDAY, Grimoire, Fence, Birdcoat Quarterly, Leavings, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Read her work in Issue 19 of Miracle Monocle.
One of my favorite aspects of Bartel’s collection is the surrealism that writer fully submerges readers in. Exit the Body feels like a liminal dreamscape that is constantly shifting and mutating all around me. In “The Knife Speaks,” for example, we witness a tarot reading wherein Bartel is accompanied by Sylvia Plath and a shot of whiskey. In “The Rage Diaries: Natural Disaster Origins,” we imagine a woman as different natural disasters, and in “Coven,” we watch a rather philosophical play made up of dead and fictional women.
None of these settings or situations are quite right or exactly possible. The effect is to make the essays almost hypnotic—as if Bartel can, at any moment, snap her fingers and make us forget about this strange world she has thrown us into. Bartel amplifies the liminality with repetition; she scarcely uses ending punctuation or and sometimes writes with no punctuation at all. In this way, she creates an anxious, ominous feeling:
It hurts when the earth breaks in half, hurts when the gap is a threat of what anyone could fall into, a gap going down into what is unfathomable, down into the fires, the furnace that heats us my god it is so warm it is so goddamned hot it is sweltering and she is melting, look, she is melting.
The surrealist, dreamlike tone of Exit the Body provides an appropriate backdrop as Bartel wrestles with the self and the division between body and mind. Her quarrels with these topics were another aspect of the collection that truly gripped me as a reader; Bartel navigates selfhood in an especially intriguing way. During her performed tarot session with Slyvia Plath in “The Knife Speaks,” for example, she writes, “A body does not choose to come into being, a mind does not choose the body it inhabits, and we do not choose to be born but then here we are, and here is the mirror reminding us that we are seen.”
Often, the motif of the mirror is used to express the idea of fear of the self. The mirror serves as both an onlooker and a lens through which to view Bartel and all the women within the essays. At times, it even has its own voice, urging choice or realization. It constantly watches and reflects, and sometimes shows us visions we may not wish to see. While the topics at hand—namely selfhood and the dichotomy of body/mind—are familiar, the way in which Bartel writes about them is unusual and near ethereal. She writes frequently about transcending the body and becoming something “other / than a noun,” employing unusual, visceral images.
One of my favorite examples of this is in “Reflection,” where Bartel describes the longing to transcend the corporeal form as, “An internal blister popped / and oozing by accident.” In the same essay, she details the “she” who wishes to be more than a noun making herself into a candle,
[...] slips a wick in-
side, strike a match and light her-
self up, let herself slip into the
oblivion of beginning to melt.
All of these examinations of the self and the body/mind dichotomy culminate, for me, in “Trajectories.” In this essay, Bartel writes, “I am another in a crowd of beings who hurt,” which delves into the core of her exploration within Exit the Body—embodiment, selfhood, and all the grief that accompanies them. As she explains earlier in the essay, “Life wounds by definition: the trajectory of living is to experience; a life experience is what categorizes a body as a person.” Such an assertion encapsulates her sense that while embodiment is not chosen and does not make a person, it's an often painful and overwhelming fact of life.
There is a distinct woman-ness to Bartel’s work in Exit the Body, which is something I enjoyed. In “Letters to a Living Ghost,” she writes, “we are both haunted by dead women.” The collection is a testament to that observation. Women, both fictional and deceased, take center stage throughout all the essays. Sylvia Plath’s presence is especially heavy, as she is both a recurring character or companion, and an inspiration—as several lines throughout various essays are pulled from her work.
Bartel seems to argue that female embodiment is particularly grievous, which is understandable considering the real-life marginalization that women face. The constant surveillance and presence of the mirror, which Bartel asserts is “feminine, aligned with the moon” reminded me of the constant pressure upon women to achieve arbitrary beauty standards, as well as the ways in which our bodies are continually objectified.
Overall, Exit the Body by Heather Bartel was an enthralling reading experience. The surreal, dreamlike tone and style of writing drew me in and immersed me completely. I found Bartel’s exploration of embodiment, grief, and the intersection between them to be profound and cathartic. The collection of essays felt like, “[a] bang or crash or perhaps just an exhale,” and reminded me of the wound that is the body and how life “generates the experience of learning to live and wanting to die.”
To purchase your copy of Exit the Body, visit Split/Lip Press online.