THIS IS GOING TO HURT

In ‘Violence Beside,’ poet Jade Lascelles seeks bright things in the dark

BY EMMA ATHENA

Local poet Jade Lascelles doesn’t shrink from what she describes as “the collapsed moment, the moment of a brutality.” She approaches it, tries to make sense of it — tentatively, of course, as a dancer might in listening to a foreign piece of music.

But Lascelles is no masochist, only a realist and an artist. As she established in her first collection of prose poems, The Inevitable, violence is woven into our social fabric: It’s impossible to escape, no matter how hard we try.

In her newly released collection, Violence Beside, Lascelles looks deeper into life under such grim conditions, and her poems are sharper for it. They reflect back an array of terrors, but also a wealth of guidance and goodness we must witness “despite how loud the violences may rasp.”

“In a way, I think all of my work is a recursive attempt at making sense of how to sit beside contradiction and ugliness,” she says from her home in Boulder. “I’m not trying to further add violence into the experience of my readers. Writing these poems, for me, was trying to create this softer, safer container for myself to come into contact with these really hard things.”

Lascelles, an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, has gathered her most personal poems yet in Violence Beside Much of her work defies easy categorization. Like The Inevitable, many poems in Violence Beside can stand alone; others build upon one another as the book progresses; some read more like creative prose. The collection emphasizes Lascelles’ personal commitment to seeking bright things no matter the dark.

“Because the violent contains the violet,” she writes in “The Morning of The Funeral.” Lascelles arranges her anger alongside empathy, pairs confusion with confidence, stillness with movement, yearning with guidance — holding together paradoxes with a sense of calm. The author has accepted the presence of violence in the world, yet is not broken by it.

‘WE CAN NEVER BE FULLY ERASED’

The three-dozen or so pieces in Violence Beside were born from the same creative flush that delivered Lascelles the contents of The

Inevitable After a series of murders and a spate of violence against women in Lascelles’ life and in the news, the fear of becoming the next headline about a missing woman rose to a new pitch. She did not want hers to be the next drop of blood glowing blue beneath a UV light “with confirmation of what once spilled out,” as she writes in “This Is Why We Are Afraid.” So Lascelles turned to her craft to help process her fear. Writing poetry “was a coping mechanism for myself, trying to write through what I was experiencing,” she says. “I was at a point where I was trying to figure out how to exist in such a violent world without it totally destroying me, because there’s not really a choice of existing in a nonviolent world right now.”

Life in Boulder County is no exception. Reports of domestic abuse and emergency room visits for sexual assault have increased since 2019, according to the District Attorney’s office and MESA (Moving to End Sexual Assault, a county-wide sexual violence resource center with offices in Lafayette), as has use of MESA’s 24-7 help hotline (303-4437300). The recent series of high-profile sexual-assault cases involving CU Boulder and BVSD student athletes underscores how deeply rooted and pervasive violence is against women. And Boulder County is far from alone: The American Journal of Emergency Medicine reports domestic violence cases around the world have increased “to unprecedented levels” in the last three years.

Lascelles’ new poems claim space beside what we must, at least for now, accept as inevitable. “We are trying to tell you that we can never be fully erased,” she concludes in “This Is Why We Are Afraid.” “The original blue colors we see running beneath our pale skin can be restored well after they turned red, then rusted, then washed away.”

Violence may be impossible to contain, but through art and poetry “it can be sectioned off into these bite-sized chunks to make it more accessible,” Lascelles says. It’s one way to move toward healing.

ON THE PAGE: Violence

Beside book launch with Jade Lascelles. 7-9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27, East Window, 4550 Broadway, C-3B2, Boulder. Free