From a Glass House

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

“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, author of Drive and How I Became Hettie Jones

“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, author of No Heaven and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America

Excerpt

From a Glass House

Percussion at bedtime!
A fist-sized rock, well-aimed,
wrecked two window panes
and missile-cruised my living room,
bestowing transparent sharpness,
ricocheted, reposed
on a walnut bookshelf
thick with history
(the Black Jacobins, class war
in ancient Greece).
Glittering quills adorned
a potted palm.

The projectile
excited scrutiny:
its mongrel shape lopsided–
round, then sharp;
its colors muddy, mixed;
its grizzled surface
something one might climb
with pitons, rope, and nerve.
No casual pebble
from our Brooklyn street
but micro-intifada’s
meditated instrument.

The cops, invited, came
and shook their heads
at damaged plaster,
angle of descent.
“He shoulda been a pitcher,”
said the paler of the pair
to the miscegenated owners
of such fragile property.

He. But I know a woman
steeped in shattering.
(“Mary would have swung
that bottle at my head
if the windshield
hadn’t stopped her.”)
I, too, have guessed the joy
of smashing vitreous taboo,
annihilating structure,
letting outside weather in.

Last week the children came
for Halloween. Some were poor:
dark, rough boys
without disguise or parents,
giddy, jostling.
Sometimes I feel a little nervous
answering my door.

Now I stand on the porch
where my enemy must have stood
to hurl her bitter tool,
his rude machine.
Why do I like to weigh it
in my hand?–
a stone with the mug
of a washed up pugilist.
A humble emissary from
the Law of Gravity.

All day we keep dissecting
the physics of the thing.