Exorcisms: The Songs of Echo by Joanna Burdzel

Poems by Joanna Burdzel

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

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 and the smog of gaslighting. Burdzel, a scholar on the historical persecution of “witches” in Eastern Europe, attains a mythical state of release through aquatic plunge and sonic emergence.

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

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.

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The poems in Exorcisms were written in two languages, English and Polish, with a trio of the latter translated to English by the poet-scholar, who explains the process as follows:

“The twenty-one poems in the Exorcisms cycle were written, selected, arranged, and edited over several years, from 2021–2023. I wrote in English and Polish, attuned to one language or the other, seeking in darkness where neither could reach.

“Only three of the Polish poems remain in the final manuscript. An essential strand of the weave, they are included in this book, along with my English translations. All reflect a journey of coming-to-voice, one which feels its way through sound, word, and image. Such movement feels natural to me, as many a bilingual native will agree.”

Joanna Burdzel
Kraków, August 2025

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2025
Edition of 400
44 pages, paperback, 12×17 cm, b&w offset (interior), color offset (cover), sewn & glued
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115 and Pure Rough 300
Designed by Sevinç Çalhanoğlu
Cover artwork: Marta Niedbał, Tender Demonesses (Czułe demonice), from the Some Holes in this House series, wool, 280×140 cm
ISBN 978-83-68165-12-8

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Joanna Burdzel is a poet and researcher from Chicago. She is currently living in Kraków, Poland, concluding her Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University, entitled “Syncretic Feminisms, Dangerous Spiritualities: Soul-Echoes of Women Writers in Poland and Russia after 1979.” Meanwhile, she is collecting materials for a new project, an exploration of non-local consciousness and intuitive healing gifts. Exorcisms: The Songs of Echo is her first collection.

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Spiral (a poem from Exorcisms)

I met you sinning
stalling starving
forgive the specters
striving straying
help the seedling
slowly seething
soaring searing
sulking seizing
sounding singing…

see?
send a selfie
say a saying
sip and suffer
sleazy sneaky
seek and secret
sordid sweetie…

seer
seer why so shallow
sorry, shadow
sorry swallow
swollen sorrow

sex
so simple
sentimental
silly sleepy
soft survival
spiral, spiral
spiral, spiral…