The Inevitable

Author: Jade Lascelles

Publisher: Gesture Press (2021)

The Inevitable is an exploration of what it means to be a vulnerable body living in a hard and violent world. Through a diptych of poetic prose narratives, it leans in close to examine the ways we are all violent beings, the ways we participate in destructive tendencies. How might we respond to being invaded? How do we romanticize brutality? The story of a prophetic infestation of moths intersects with a Magical Realist tale of young boys, wildfires, and black holes. And in the crossroads of all these pieces, a compass begins to form, illuminating the unavoidable directions violence takes in our lives—"the inevitability of certain trajectories."

“Never has death, violence, and destruction felt so quiet. Within the pages of The Inevitable, Jade Lascelles gives power to the minute observation of the quotidian. Through luminous and crystalline prose, each detail builds upon the other like a pile of dead and dusty moths in a windowsill or a spark that catches a dry leaf that sets everything on fire. These subtly connected narratives provide a lucid understanding of what it means to observe one’s own transformation—one that is redolent with the terrible beauty inevitable from such an experience. These are stories that linger and hum with enchantment.”

–Sara Veglahn

“Lascelles begins The Inevitable with the premise that the fabric of the blank page is the light upon which moths gnaw. Her poetics opens a mouth of moths, fluttering toward utterance, toward the light of day, toward death. The book’s second and final allegorical essay/poem moves through the conversation of consumption from the element of dust toward the element of fire. In both pieces, the mouth is our hinge point, the place of comingling, of creation and destruction, of history, of allegory, of elegy, the door to the haunted house of our human perception.”

–Andrea Rexilius

“A woman contemplates ‘the pattern of terrible things waiting to drown her.’ A boy comes to grasp ‘the inevitability of certain trajectories.’ Meanwhile, dead moths pile up. Sticks scatter on the ground. Subtle and satisfying, The Inevitable moves through these parables of male violence towards unexpected ends. Lascelles is a deft guide in this troubled and troubling terrain, insistently holding space for our own illumination.”

–Erik Anderson

“Deeply expressive, visceral, and delightfully macabre, this little book is a gem. Lascelles’s exploration of desire, violence, and personal suffering is startling in its attention to the human interior. Like a dancer, the poet slips between worlds—delicate and brutal, quiet and insistent, shadowy and illuminated—weaving threads of duende, feminism, duality, and magical realism into what is truly a work of art.”

–Dani Barnhart