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Enlarge Cover
list price: $15.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Apr 2002
ISBN:9780889711839
publisher:
Nightwood Editions
Description
City of Vancouver's Poet Laureate for 2009-2011
In 1999 Brad Cran exploded onto the Canadian literary scene with the release of Hammer & Tongs, a milestone anthology of the country's newest generation of poets. It became the bestselling book in the history of the Vancouver International Writers Festival and was followed by a cross-Canada tour with sold-out shows in Calgary, Toronto and Victoria. In 2001, he co-edited the innovative anthology Why I Sing the Blues, a book/CD project that featured three generations of North America's most prominent poets writing blues lyrics.
The Good Life is the long awaited first full-length book of poems by one of Canada's most exciting new poets. From the glorious excesses of North American life to the mechanical bleakness that it often depends on, The Good Life is an unapologetic examination of our cultural and human vices. With deft precision, Cran exposes the good life's underbelly and its motives to surround us in buzzing monotony, to oust spirituality and purity and replace them with "sharp steel" and vertigo, and finally to swallow us whole.
As a publisher and literary impresario Brad Cran has established a national reputation as one of Canada's most successful promoters of new poetry. The Good Life is a landmark book by a poet and cultural activist who has already changed how poetry is perceived in Canada.
Editorial Reviews
"Brad Cran wields a reckless new voice full of love and wrath. These are poems that carom down the highway of lost memory past the detritus of mall dreams, crab feasts and soporific suburbs - full speed into uncertainty."
-Hal Niedzviecki
— Hal Niedzviecki
"In Cran's poems, a hallucinatory vision of reality isn't a pose. Rather, he's channelling the voices of visionary poets who transformed the whole Western European understanding of poetry: Villon, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud. . . . Cran sustains a boldly poetic diction that is all too rare. . . . If you read only one book of poems a year, make it this one."
-John Moore, Vancouver Sun
— Vancouver Sun
Cran's firm roots in urban topographies (mostly Vancouver) lend fresh energy to living on the western edge of things. . . . The poems in The Good Life fly off the page, fierce, urgent and fun. The lines of verse almost pile up, trip up, one after and over the next. Cran dares you to keep up in this pell-mell rush through cityscapes. "Leaving" - there is movement even in the titles! - speaks of rooming houses, of half-cemented relationships, of assertions that 'down your spine/ the secrets of posture pop to the percussion of demise.' The imperatives of Spider's 3 A.M." are clever and sharp ('Here is the art of stopping the world with the cheapest rum sold/ between this bar and the tip of Orion's sword') and the verve of the urban swirl that is 'Cityscape XI,' with its 'life of unpacked boxes/ and searching for a union job,' is exhilarating." -Andrew Lesk, Books in Canada
— Books in Canada
"Cran's exposure of humankind's ignorance, banality and lack of forgiveness is done tenderly, acknowledging the yearning from which our hopeful distortions spring. . . . The fragmentary, dream-like quality of Cran's urban lexicon poems echoes this sensibility, as do his short, declaritive statements piled next to and atop each other like bricks, to build wall-like poems that sit in broad dense blocks on the page."
-Sonnet L'Abbe, Canadian Literature
— Canadian Literature
"...excites nearly from start to finish. ... a strong blend of sensory language and clean narratives, a constant strength is extended to the reader who is taken on an journey of equal parts word lust and memory debunking. ... In "Today After Rain" (pg. 74) mood and philosophy are contained in a postcard of lush language, hushing us across the minute landscape, scraping our knees with pleasure."
-Nathaniel G. Moore, The Danforth Review
— Danforth Review
"Whether they're about travel, a childhood friend who died of an overdose, or the end of love, Brad's poems dig beyond the surface to reveal what is flawed and human in all of us. They're muscular and tender and musically rich. A new voice to be grateful for." -Lorna Crozier
— Lorna Crozier
"Brad Cran, poet and publisher, is known on the West Coast for having his finger on the pulse of the next generation of literary stars." -The National Post
— National Post
"Cran's firm roots in urban topographies (mostly Vancouver) lend fresh energy to living on the western edge of things... The poems in The Good Life fly off the page, fierce, urgent and fun. The lines of verse almost pile up, trip up, one after and over the next. Cran dares you to keep up in this pell-mell rush through cityscapes."
-Andrew Lesk, Books in Canada
— Books in Canada
"Vancouver publisher Brad Cran demonstrates a thoughtful, eclectic intelligence in this debut poetry collection. Although one of his poems, "The Murder of a Young Italian," denounces the killing of an anti-globalization protester, any apparent radicalism is not apparent in his politics. His literary discourse is reasoned and measured...
"Brad Cran's poetry is accessible, cerebral, and human in every sense of the word."
-Ronald Charles Epstein, Canadian Book Review Annual
— Canadian Book Review Annual
