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.
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.
Brad Cran is a writer and social entrepreneur who served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver from April 2009 until October of 2011. Cran published his first book, The Good Life, in 2001 and his most recent book, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (with Gillian Jerome), won the City of Vancouver Book Award and has raised over $60,000 for marginalized people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He is currently finishing his second book of non-fiction The Truth about Ronald Reagan: How Movies Changed the World.
"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
"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
"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
"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
"...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
"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
"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
"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
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
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