Jan Clausen

Veiled Spill: A Sequence Jan Clausen

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Women's Studies. Begun in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and European laws banning the full face veil, this book 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. Transfixed by the pressure of wildly cascading events that engulf the very possibility of narrative order, the sequence hints, as well, that in a world where what is veined / is spilling everywhere, we are already in the revolutionary situation.

Jan Clausen in VEILED SPILL writes of complicated vulnerability and feminist resistance and as she does this, she looks for allies and alliances with such a deep love, with such a lyric invocation.--Juliana Spahr