VIOLENCE BESIDE responds to the overwhelming presence of violence Jade Lascelles felt creeping closer into her life. After a series of threats, assaults, and murders against multiple women in various proximity to her, these poems were first begun as a coping mechanism, a way to look for some sense of grounding around how to exist within a world of violence without being consumed by it or absorbed by the fear of it. How to persist despite violence without ignoring it.
"Let's crowd around these Jade Lascelles poems, 'because the violent contains the violet, ' just as it has been doing beyond the blurred vision. This book throws on the switch to light our nerves in an ill-lit landscape at the back of the memory. Jade brings it forward! Thank you, dear poet. I love this book so much!"
--CAConrad
"A low hum spreads through the layers of VIOLENCE BESIDE, accurately sounding the collective terror of being a woman in a murderous world. A metronome in the catacombs, here is a book that keeps time--oracular time, all while calibrating lamentations for the missing, destroyed, and disrupted to a bold rhizomic feminism that imagines the limit of language, and what is beyond that limit. Jade Lascelles has written a stunning and visionary book."--Selah Saterstrom
"From a captivating meditation on running alone as a woman to its elegant denouement on the generosity of grief, this book haunts. Disquiets, lingers. It's also scary as hell if you're paying attention. Which Jade Lascelles is-not only to the ways women are still terrorized by the violence of men; to the ways language codifies breach; but also to the ways women, in dancing bodies, at breakfast tables, create spaces that transmute violence. A complete achievement of the essay lyric, VIOLENCE BESIDE dissents from the inevitable at every opportunity."--Megan Levad
"If violence is beside you, you aren't it ... Lascelles reminds us that morning always breaks and that what we remember is always real. Because she also shows how memory can simultaneously be a protector, a shield, she plants seeds for us to forgive our trespasses against ourselves."--Mairead Case
"VIOLENCE BESIDE is unstoppable... A slow, quiet sentence that proliferates, a bruise spreading under skin, blue and sanguine. Dissociative, tactile, the lyric relaxes into textures of interiority as a means of tenacious survival, remaining cool, ethereal, perceptive, epiphanic, in spite of the perpetual presence of the titular violence beside."
--Ella Longpre
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Family & Relationships. Women's Studies. Miscellaneous.
