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front cover_inside violence.jpg
Author photo copy.JPG

Inside Violence Violence Inside by Lovely Raju

$17.00

Inside Violence Violence Inside is a lyrical cartography of harm and tenderness where the body shelters both, and a voice learns to live between them.

Greatly inspired by the tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School, Lovely Raju’s poetry collection does not cease at the sound of gunfire. These poems also confront domestic ruptures and reveal how violence echoes through households, landscapes, and memory itself.

Divided into four mirrored movements (Inside / Violence / Violence / Inside), the collection becomes a study—and perhaps a remedial study—of violence: a search for resolution in existing trauma, for justice for a half-dead mother, and for language strong enough to bear exhaustion. Along the way, the reader encounters a deer licking a window, angels in a neighborhood park, a sapling lost to a storm, and two women—one in hijab, one nearly bare—radiant as “flowers emitting the aroma of a morning sun.”

Raju’s lines hold violence in one hand and transformation in the other. At once intimate, surreal, and fiercely humane, this book hopes—more than anything—to strike a nerve.

Inside Violence Violence Inside is a lyrical cartography of harm and tenderness where the body shelters both, and a voice learns to live between them.

Greatly inspired by the tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School, Lovely Raju’s poetry collection does not cease at the sound of gunfire. These poems also confront domestic ruptures and reveal how violence echoes through households, landscapes, and memory itself.

Divided into four mirrored movements (Inside / Violence / Violence / Inside), the collection becomes a study—and perhaps a remedial study—of violence: a search for resolution in existing trauma, for justice for a half-dead mother, and for language strong enough to bear exhaustion. Along the way, the reader encounters a deer licking a window, angels in a neighborhood park, a sapling lost to a storm, and two women—one in hijab, one nearly bare—radiant as “flowers emitting the aroma of a morning sun.”

Raju’s lines hold violence in one hand and transformation in the other. At once intimate, surreal, and fiercely humane, this book hopes—more than anything—to strike a nerve.

Lovely Raju is originally from Bangladesh. He holds a BS in Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from the University of Rajshahi. Seeking to nurture his poetic talents further, he pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame. Raju has worked as an assistant editor at Action Books, an international press for poetry and translations. His interests include ecopoetry, social justice poetry, and dream poetry. His debut full-length poetry book, HOPE, is out now from the Finishing Line Press. He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find him on Instagram @ppp_lovely_raju/.

 

“These are crushing, quiet, deeply introspective poems in which language cannot be pinned down and death and life, boredom and dread, senselessness and love exchange places so often it becomes undeniable they share an identity within us all. Lovely Raju’s poetry defies scrutiny, and in that disarming ambiguity, dissolves distinctions between the other and the self.”

—Michael J. Deluca, author of The Jaguar Mask

“Pulsing with vulnerability and openness, these verses respond like new scars to the violence that wounds them into existence. Lovely Raju runs on a surrealist nerve that is not any kind of flight: the book’s haunting slippages and shape-shifting figures assemble a “woven love” tough enough to bear all the ways we shred and tear. These poems—haunting and healing--“borrow the sky.”

—Matthew Kilbane, author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetica Media

“At once an extremely American book - about the way violence enters us, circulates between us - and a wholly unique book. The speaker observes the world with the clarity of a stranger, the precision of the language creating a peculiar intensity.”

—Johannes Göransson, author of Summer