About the Book
Begin in Denmark with a strange birth, experience the life of Anne turned Arne, a hermaphrodite. Journey then to Alberta where Vivian Hansen hears her ancestors and the remarkable story of Anne. This intricately braided long poem is delicate, forceful, and unique. A Bitter Mood of Clouds is woven with supernatural voices, history, and the depth of where we come from and how those connections reach into the present.
A Bitter Mood of Clouds is a lyric cauldron of intersex confusion and desires haunted by time and place; the skaldic ghosts and voices and spirits, narrating a changing body into existence. It’s the old language, the one we need to hear, the language of our roots and histories, the magic language. Read and listen, and it will inhabit you.
A Canadian Creative Writer in Calgary
Vivian Hansen
Vivian’s publications include three full-length books of poetry, Leylines of My Flesh, which chronicles the experiences of Danish Canadians in western Canada. A Bitter Mood of Clouds was released in 2013, and records the life and times of Arne Petersen, who received sex reassignment in Denmark in 1953. Most recently A Tincture of Sunlight (2017), the story about Old Man, a WWII veteran, biologist and life commentator. Vivian has published recent essays in Coming Here, Being Here (ed: Don Mulcahy, Guernica Editions 2016), and in Waiting (University of Alberta Press 2018). She has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.”