Jan Clausen

Stories

Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover

Poetry. IF YOU LIKE DIFFICULTY presents Jan Clausen's controversial playful language and unapologetic assertions as a tour de force as "Shakespearean as it is June Jordean." IF YOU LIKE DIFFICULTY treads its heavy feet across the plains of what some have left blithely contented. In a variety of speech (bridged bite of lyric or agile bounding narrative phrases--all composed of wit and bright shards of anger and loving, Clausen's poems will not surrender to the inept. Jan Clausen is also the author of the memoir Apples and Oranges (Houghton Mifflin).

If You Like Difficulty

The Prosperine Papers

Je transporte des explosifs on les appelle des mots Poésie & féminismes aux États-Unis

Martin B. Duberman

Argues that defining sexuality on gender preference is a Euro-American attitude which restricts sexual desire, and discusses issues regarding sexual orientation

Understanding Sexual Orientation

Beyond Gay Or Straight

Sexuality and identity are the twin goddesses that lend Jan Clausen’s Apples & Oranges its grace and urgency. In the late 1980s, after more than a decade living within a strong Brooklyn lesbian community with her female lover and their daughter, Clausen travels to a war zone in Nicaragua, where she falls in love with a West Indian male lawyer. Her memoir is brimming with intimate physical and emotional details of her personal journey, but perhaps what sets it apart are the deeply informed historical and philosophical lenses through which she examines her own experience. Deeply felt, intensely thoughtful, gorgeously written, Apples & Oranges is a testament to the power and peril of desire. It is also a dazzling examination of the ways in which our search for love and happiness intersect. What does it mean to be straight? What does it mean to be queer? Jan Clausen gives us not one but many answers to these questions.

Jan Clausen

Books

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