Lazyline Records ::

"Helena Kvarnstrom is the nurse you both dread and long for when you're sick: she'll mop your brow with one sweet soft hand and drive the needle home with the other; she's the angel come to take you to hell and bring you back again. Let her. "Violence" is worth the trip, every delicious and poisonous breath of it. Open your heart, close your eyes, give yourself over: she'll break you in pieces and kiss you together again and you will love every burning minute." -- Victoria Lancelotta, Author of "Here in the World and Far"

"Helena Kvarnstrom has the unsettling ability to infuse her art -- whether text or photograph -- with sexuality, ugliness and raw pain all at the same time. She picks at society's scabs, pokes at our bruises, and photographs the cum stains we try to keep hidden. Through her brutally honest but startlingly lovely portraits, Kvarnstrom achieves a level of honesty many of us can never reach. When she turns her lens on herself, her body speaks for the voiceless." -- Emily Pohl-Weary, Author of "A Girl Like Sugar"

"The words that pour out of Violence seep into your head and make you rethink what you thought violence was. The word violence means so much less than the actions that make it exist. Helena Kvarnstrom makes her words blend together so well that it's hard to tell what is real and what is not. Maybe it doesn't matter either way. Once they're off the page and into your mind, the reality of them becomes all too pulsing." -- Melinda Smith, The Montclarion

"Violence is a force to shatter windows as much as it gently holds hands. Helena is able to convey the dangers of everyday interaction and the lack of safety in what is called love without being overtly confrontational; before you know it, you're stripped as bare as the characters are and it's like you weren't even paying attention. What it really is: her words are frank without losing lyricism. I kept this book with me everywhere for months and every time, I found something new." -- Meg Wang, Author of "Vitaphobia"

We have for long known Helena Kvarnstrom's writing and photography. We fell in love with her years ago when we came across her site Myredself.org. We were, at first, unsettled, then curious, and finally, in awe.
Helena published a self-made book entitled "Violence," which contained her writing and photography. We, of course, purchased a copy and the book stayed with us everywhere we went. Some months later, mustering up a bit of courage, we wrote Helena and asked if she might be interested in publishing a version with Lazyline. She was and we were delighted to have "Violence" as our first book.

"Violence" to us is many things and we do not precisely know how to describe it. We asked a few others to describe what it meant to them and one description by Elizabeth Barker, a Venus contributor, seemed wonderfully apt:

"Violence cuts into that corner of your consciousness where desire is stripped raw and revealed for all its potential fierceness, wonder and danger. Like revisiting the first words and sounds to simultaneously electrify and terrify your heart -- a spooky-seductive fairy tale, your favorite record when you were 14 -- Helena's stories make you reach back and grasp onto your most unfettered and soul-stirring notions of the powers of love, sex, despair, beauty and obsession."

Gabriel H. Benzur III, a talented Atlanta-based designer put together the layout, and Tiphanie Brooke of Antigirl.com, whose stunning collages ever haunt us, designed the cover.

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An Excerpt:

"And I'll bury myself so deep inside you and I'll be your tragedy and you won't have to find it anywhere else, pay for it on movie screens and play it in your songs, I can be all the tragedy you need and I'll tell you all my stories and you'll look so serious and maybe you'll cry and you'll say you're so sorry you're so sorry and I'll write myself onto your palms onto your lips you'll swallow me hard you'll wonder if you're one of my stories too and one day the back of your hand will run into my cheekbone. Your hand will run into my cheekbone and I'll become sand."