Escape Girl Blues by Dawn Pichón Barron

I am moved by the ruin and ominous beauty of abandoned places, the way weeds and wildlife reclaim the land people once occupied. In the same way I’m drawn to Dawn Pichón Barron’s Escape Girl Blues as it sprouts from experiences of historical, institutional, and personal trauma.  From the past to the present, between those “infinite seconds of silence,” I can hear her rising voice which “nothing now can hide.”

“Resistance is written in my history,” Barron writes. It’s also embedded within her passionate and honest verse. Escape Girl Blues is a collection tempered by experience and tender when it counts. Barron lets us know she is “the wild one,” and we all would do well to remember what is wild wins out in the end.

–Michael Schmeltzer, author of “Elegy/Elk River,” and “Blood Song”

“I want to tell you a story by/ Telling you nothing,” begins the speaker of Escape Girl Blues. She goes on to sing the visceral threats of the body, “the shape/Too long in the bath,” the rage of ongoing colonialism in America. Dawn Pichón Barron’s book is a credo bellowing from the deep of the self, warning us that the “broken will be left/ behind to fossilize their grief.” But the poems don’t leave anything behind, and they don’t let us look away—we witness the “Indian Girl” with “no where to go but the river” give a man a blow job under a bridge, the “sky a rotting peach.” We witness her question whether wearing an escapulario really makes one lucky . . . we feel with her “a thousand threaded needles piercing flesh and bone,” with her we wonder what the earth is, we say yes, yes, yes, when she asserts “resistance is written in my history,” and we are in her throat when she arrives at: “Nothing now can hide my voice.” Buy this book; sing along.

 –Maya Jewell Zeller, author of RUST FISH and YESTERDAY, THE BEES

These fierce, tender poems by Dawn Pichón Barron are American songs, American blues, bloody and muddy and soulful and true.
–Samuel Ligon, author of Safe in Heaven Dead: A Novel, Drift and Swerve, Among the Dead and Dreaming, Wonderland