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City of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate for 2009-2011In 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.

Poems that occupy the difficult territory of contemporary crisis with great candour and trenchant wit.

Steve McOrmond’s unflinching take on contemporary life, with its saturnine candour and ironic focus, may remind readers of the anti-poetry of Europeans like Zbigniew Herbert: intense, humanistic and deeply sceptical of inflationary gestures or stagy rhetoric. Shedding illusions, but equally refusing the consolations of despair, McOrmond’s well-tempered satire is carried home on its own crisp music.

The title poem has, as it narrative background, the encounter between the narrator and a young door-to-door missionary, one who sets his worldly and jaded scepticism against her innocence and faith. “The Good News about Armageddon” poses questions that are difficult and durable (“In these hours of prolific / doubt, how will we acquit ourselves?”), as well as those that are topical (“Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?”) and probes with accurate wit (“We are an argument / for unintelligent design”). This is essential poetry for our time — astute, informed, bitingly satirical, yet grounded in its quest for words that, like Cordelia’s, reverb no hollowness.

Nancy Shaw was an award-winning poet, scholar, and critic who was formative in shifting the ground of Canadian literature and poetics. She was co-director of the influential Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) and Writing magazine, was an artist-in-residence at the Western Front in the 1980s, and served as a chair of the Vancouver New Music Society.

In a 1994 CBC interview with KSW poets Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, and Shaw herself, Shelagh Rogers asked American poet Peter Gizzi to describe their work, and he said: “Their work is unbridled, valiant, and vivid. [Their] vocabulary [is] reinventing the present.”

Shaw’s work was rooted in the contemporary and deeply concerned with collaboration, the institutionalization of art, the potential of the epistolary form, and the breaking of poetic conventions by offering interdisciplinary perspectives.

In Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, Shaw wrote that collaborations allowed her to “question notions of authorship and originality.” She collaborated with artists and musicians such as Eric Metcalfe, and drew from popular music to write anthems and torch songs such as “Torch Song #6” in which she asserts: “[…] burst through my song / my watery one / my singular scrap.”

Edited by Catriona Strang, who co-authored Busted and Cold Trip with Shaw, The Gorge collects a range of Shaw’s prolific writing with a focus on her collaborations and poetry.

The Gorge: Selected Writing of Nancy Shaw resumes Talonbooks’ affordable and carefully curated Selected Writing series that began in
the 1980s.