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.
Vivian Hansen’s intentionesque study of gendered and geopolitical gerrymandering is witnessed through the eyes of Arne/Anne. Arne is born in a gutteral Danish outpost about to be annexed by the harsh German consonant. Trapped between the great wars, between Yggdrasil and “the slugs that write their letter and lineage,” a family honours its past and embraces the outspoken.