Although I love working with Clojure more than any other language it's relationship with its host is somewhat schizophrenic. Calling Java classes from carefully-crafted functional code is like pouring tomato ketchup over a lemon sorbet. Thankfully there are about 23,000 pure Clojure libraries at clojars.org to help my Clojure code stay functional.
It depends on what your requirements are. Through the years, I found it easier to write reliable code by just skipping the Clojure wrapper libraries (e.g. using Kafka directly rather than a wrapper): it's easier to "escape" into functionality the wrapper doesn't offer, and it's typically more performant as well.
