Violence Beside

Jade Lascelles

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!”

— CA Conrad

“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, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher

“We praise poems for holding up a mirror to power, but mirrors reverse reality so that we never see ourselves. Violence Beside uses the shadows in the corners instead. No cold slick reflect: absorb. The public is private, the most interesting rapists are actually seducers, biology is neither balm nor maul. From an absorbing 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, author of What I Have to Say to You

“If violence is beside you, you aren’t it. In this luminous and patient book, Jade 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. This book takes its reader into the light it describes, and if that isn’t mutual aid, I don’t know what is.”

— Mairead Case, author of Tiny

“Violence Beside is unstoppable. This book is not a difficult text but its subject is hard to stomach, blood that runs easily over skin but catches in the throat. Lascelles is a careful and fearless narrator of the violence inscribed on the femme experience, persisting in a process of becoming even while biting back. The form itself is the puncture of that bite, showing through the page. But the lyric respects its reader as an ally, a night with a new friend whose lucidity cuts into deeper intimacy while nourishing and warming the room. 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. It’s a familiar narrative space where walls seep, moths singe, morning breaks, but told from the other side of the mirror: a new song. I willingly consented to read it in one impossible breath like being held under water– in its stunning close, fed by the salt of its power and grief.”

— Ella Longpre, author of How to Keep You Alive