Ablationsite

Website for writer Jan Clausen, author of Veiled Spill (GenPop Books 2014), If You Like Difficulty, From a Glass House, Apples & Oranges...

Ablation, from a Latin root meaning to carry away, can mean the erosion of a glacier’s mass or the surgical removal of an organ or body tissue. We are living in a time of radical subtraction, barbaric amputations, vicious impunities—the Anthropocene, an age when all of Earth has become an ablation site. So many ancient things that might have been conserved are coming to an end.

Reality is appalling. The point is to change it. Living and writing the only way we can—under the sign of species suicide—how shall we invent the going-on?

Background photograph © copyright 2013 by Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.: Modern metal sculpture, “Homage to the Castellers,” Barri Gotic, Barcelona. The photograph also appears (in original color) on the cover of Jan Clausen's book, Veiled Spill: A Sequence.

New poems

Veiled Spill: A Sequence

veiled-spill-coverGenPop Books, October 2014
Poetry. 7.5″ x 9.5″, 92 pp, paperback
ISBN: 9780982359471
Cover photo: Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.
$16

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Begun in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and European laws banning the full face veil, Jan Clausen’s Veiled Spill unfolds a meditation on the links and gaps between interior glimpses and sprawling histories, between the beauty of the moment and the terror of the plot. Bridging poetry and prose, lyric and documentary, sampling and improvisation, it tracks the brooding presence of brittle technologies, the obdurate contingencies of gender and race, the fate of religious questions in the absence of gods, and the desperate freedom of art at a time when conventional social action seems powerless to avert the wreck of the biosphere. [Read more]

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Background photograph © copyright 2013 by Robert A. Schaefer, Jr.: Modern metal sculpture, “Homage to the Castellers,” Barri Gotic, Barcelona. The photograph also appears (in original color) on the cover of Jan Clausen's book, Veiled Spill: A Sequence.

Jan Clausen

Jan-Clausen Jan Clausen is the author of a dozen books in a range of genres, including Veiled Spill: A Sequence, from GenPop Books (2014). Other recent poetry collections are From a Glass House and If You Like Difficulty. Prose titles include the story collection Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover; the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers; and the memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity.

Clausen’s poetry and creative prose are widely published in journals and anthologies; her book reviews and literary journalism have appeared in Boston Review, Ms., The Nation, Poets & Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books. [Read more]