Songs I Use to Chase Rye

Brad Cran is a bad boy. He gets a date with a wine-drinking feminist and spends the evening drinking bourbon out of the bottle, telling politically incorrect jokes in his head. Then he accidentally backs into a telephone pole while chanting “Lorna’s a chick, Lorna’s a chick.” Later in this collection, we are treated to a poem wherein the narrator picks his nose whilst reminiscing about Danny, the kid in grade three who had a predilection for eating his own snot. A guy in a Beamer picks Brad up hitch-hiking. A friend ODs. What you get through all these moments is a picture of the world through very heavily tinted Brad-coloured glasses. It feels like Brad wrote these poems while wearing mirrored sunglasses with the mirrored part on the inside. The bio on the back of this handsomely designed little chapbook says, “Brad Cran is. No further information is available at this time.” If you want a picture of a world where Brad Cran is, and everything else isn’t, get this book.(KS)

chapbook, 16 pages / main creator: Brad Cran / publisher: smoking lung press / $5 / 103-1014 Homer St., Vancouver, BC, V6B 2W9, [email protected]

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