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ISBN 9780978600969 I cleave to the brave idea/of not torturing the world. This new volume of poetry by the author of From a Glass House and the trailblazing memoir Apples and Oranges reveals a complex, wide-ranging voice rendered both hoarse and tender by the poet’s apprehension of her world’s fragility. Terse grief abuts pointed gallows humor in poems that take on the “smiley face” of ubiquitous war in the new millennium, looping from urban life made vulnerable by its excessive complexity to interludes of refuge in natural surroundings beset by the disruption of ancient cycles. Images of “ablation” (the wearing away of glaciers, the surgical excision of bodily tissue) evoke the beauty and pathos, terror and comedy of a world/wound that manifests as “both throat and blade.” Starkly political and passionately lyrical, If You Like Difficulty tracks the passage of an individual life through the desolate straits of our current history, while posing the urgent, unanswerable question: Does a planet have a point of view? "Jan
Clausen’s witty, resourceful poems turn on a dime from abab formal to
text message-y digital, hugging the curves of language with precision
and wild glee. 'Tufts of dithyramb' thrust from the cracks of a
staggered republic, her verses had me feeling we’re just one good
ablation away from making things right & new. In the 'struggle/to
alchemize syntax/ out of just feeling fuckd,' it’s Jan who wins
hands-down 'aqui/la luz/ resumes.'" Praise for From A Glass House “Jan Clausen speaks of gardens, griefs, ladybugs, loves in personal poems that reveal an intensely political life, an engagement with the particular to bring home the whole. Her glass house gleams, shakes, but never shatters. What a wonderful, wide-ranging read!” “Tough, dense, intelligent, witty, alive to the moment—and to past and future….Jan Clausen is American down to her toes, and right on target. Read these truth-telling poems and be grateful.” Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Jan Clausen has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1973. Her many books include the poetry collections Duration (Hanging Loose, 1983) and From a Glass House (IKON, 2007); the novels Sinking, Stealing (Crossing Press, 1985) and The Prosperine Papers (Crossing Press, 1989); and the memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Clausen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (fiction) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (poetry). A veteran of the feminist small press movement, she was a founder of the lesbian feminist journal Conditions, which she co-edited from 1977-1981. Her poetry, fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in Bloom, Boston Review, Coconut, Drunken Boat, Fence, Hanging Loose, The Hat, Heliotrope, Kenyon Review, Margie, Ms., The Nation, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poets and Writers, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is represented in the anthologies For a Living: The Poetry of Work, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, Poems from the Women’s Movement, Red, White, and Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America, and Writing the World: On Globalization. Perennially active in feminist and other social justice movements, Clausen is on the faculty of the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program and also teaches writing workshops at the New School and N.Y.U. For further information, visit her on the web at: ablationsite.org Readings and Events
Tuesday, October 27, 2009: NYC
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