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Alleys, capillaries, thorns: these are the words that writer Edwidge Danticat uses in Claire of the Sea Light (2013) to describe Ville Rose, the imagined seaside slum town on the southern coast of Haiti. Ville Rose, setting for the early stories in Krik? Krak!(1995), is also the town where the fictional events unfold and develop in Claire of the Sea Light, the writer’s most recent novel. These lyrical and poetic words, which I foreground here, evoke not only geographical landscapes but also corporeal circuits and botanical paths, perhaps even the difficult and transitory migrations between life and death, birth and end passageways. Ville Rose is not only the geographical heartbeat and cartographic compass of Danticat’s oeuvre; it is also the intellectual focus of this chapter, which asserts that Ville Rose is essential, even foundational, for understanding violence, particularly sexual, maternal, or infant violence, in Danticat’s …