How to Escape a Burning House by Eileen Lawrence

Eileen Lawrence’s debut collection, How to Escape a Burning House, is a poetic marvel. Readers are gifted a guide for how to end an emotionally abusive relationship: testament to the metamorphosis, to those shifting tectonic plates, which accompany such action. Unflinching, the poet writes about the complicated actions required for the steadiness to leave. Somehow I got them to school the next morning…I unstitched the fabric of our marriage. I packed my clothes and my favorite books…half of their toys. The speaker finds a voice grounded in courage and authenticity, fills the fractures with new dreams and grows—from the silent small space of married life—into a woman who bravely questions the very nature of home and becomes the hero of her own story.

–Tina Carlson, author of Obsidian, A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, We Are Meant to Carry Water (co-author), and Ground, Wind, This Body.

This remarkably honest book would have been welcome when my own house was burning. I could have learned from the speaker’s courageous journey through these compelling, well-crafted poems. As the years pass, she “folds in” on herself under the increasing weight of a difficult marriage, ultimately becoming a mere “shadow” curled inside a restricting cocoon. Her husband is oblivious that his demands and anger—familiar to her from her childhood—take away her sense of self. With hard-gained will she moves from collusion in this rocky relationship to perseverance to “unstitch its fabric” and be visible again. But this courage must carry over to being the mother she wants to be to her children. Only then, can she “unfurl” from the cocoon, find the freedom and lightness of the butterfly she was always meant to be.

–Sandi Stromberg, author of Frogs Don’t Sing Red, editor of Untameable City and Echoes of the Cordillera.

How to Escape a Burning House opens with the image of a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis stage, “wings wet, trusting the air to hold it aloft.” The speaker remembers being trapped like a chrysalis, “held there by invisible forces” but “now I dance in the breeze / weightless and full of wonder.” These poems are composed of courage. And the confidence that comes of rebuilding in the aftermath of loss. Page by page, they offer hope. These poems are essential reading.

–David Meischen, Caliche Road Poems, Anyone’s Son: Poems (winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry, 2020, from the Texas Institute of Letters). Managing Editor, Dos Gatos Press.