Return to Book Page Praise for The Good Life Review in the Vancouver Sun The Good Life By Brad Cran AVAILABLE 0-88971-183-6 Nightwood Editions 5.25 x 7.5 · 88 pages Paperback · $15.95 April 2002 The long awaited first full-length book of poems by one of Canada's most exciting new poets. 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