How to Burn a Woman 

[E]very human being gets
two deaths: the second one’s the last time
someone living says or writes your name.

Claire Askew’s How to Burn a Woman excavates an inheritance of violence against women handed down from the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries. While we encounter familiar stories from Salem, Askew also digs into her own family tree, remembering “Anne Askew,” her thirteen times great aunt who was murdered at the age of twenty-five in 1546. “I will keep committing your name,” Askew vows, staying Anne’s second death over four hundred years past her first one.

Prefaced with a trigger warning for sexual abuse, sexual assault, and descriptions of torture, How to Burn a Woman flips between witch poems and poems about the speaker’s own relationships with men. At times, it’s hard to square modern tales of jilted lovers with torture and state-sanctioned murder, but the legacy of gendered violence comes through in poems like “Christopher’s rules for skimming stones, which are also rules for living,” in which we learn, “He’d use those same deft / hands in anger.” 

Askew’s delight in image and rhythm stands its ground against her terrifying subject matter. In “Library,” the anaphoric use of “still” rises to a frantic pitch in the poem’s final lines: “still behind me the wind will lift the blossom over the wall / into the air and over the still still still still town.” 

The texture of rural Scotland is also wonderfully constant, with “[…] stars / thick and yellow as gorse” and searchlights that “glitter on the loch like spilt fuel.” I appreciated inhabiting this world sprinkled with Scots words that “bring the spirit down / like a bird in haar” and show us “the kirkyard laburnums […] / […] / dropping pods of blossom on the old graves.” These poems are an elegy against forgetting.