If You Like Difficulty

ISBN 978-0-9786009-6-9
Harbor Mountain Press
© 2007
$14

Terse grief abuts pointed gallows humor in poems that take on the “smiley face” of ubiquitous war in the new millennium. The image of “ablation” that titles the long concluding poem evokes the beauty and pathos, terror and comedy of a world/wound that manifests as “both knife and blade.” 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.
--Rodney Koeneke, author of Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press)

Click here to read a poem from If You Like Difficulty.

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From a Glass House

ISBN 978-0-945368-15-1
IKON
© 2007
$12.95

From a Glass House reflects a pervasive sense of the world’s fragility together with an unsparing vision of our human responsibility to the local and global histories in which we’re immersed. These are feminist poems that pointedly dissect “what can go wrong between women.” They are North American poems that look to the global South more often than to Europe for frames of reference. They side with insurgencies both political and linguistic, while keeping a weather eye on the inevitable complications.

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.—Alicia Ostriker

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!
--Hettie Jones

Click here to read the title poem.

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From a Glass House is also available from Small Press Distribution: www.spdbooks.org