I hold my breath but you fall asleep.
Enter just once into this turbid green

tear off my name, scratch out my face
burn the dull shadow

taste the ashes
and find me, please.

Joanna Burdzel’s collection Exorcisms: The Songs of Echo is a cycle of emancipatory spells of self-discovery in which the poet, alternating between scrying surfaces of English and Polish, weaves an escape from patriarchal traps. Burdzel, a scholar of literature and women’s history, whose research has touched upon the figure of the witch within feminist movements, attains a mythical state of release through aquatic plunge and sonic emergence.

Spectacular sea orphan,
spat out to face the moon, now.

Black ocean wraps you soft
in song, tightly.

aeaea—aeaea (aeaea—aeaea)

Unfurling across the book’s cover is Polish artist Marta Niedbał’s textile artwork Tender Demonesses (Czułe demonice), woven in Kraków, the city in which Joanna Burdzel completed the Exorcisms cycle.