by Bruce Craven
Published 12/13/19
PurchaseBuena Suerte in Red Glitter resonates with the spiritual and secular hunger of a Johnny Cash album. Craven's poetry roams the raw edge of suburban Los Angeles, raising a full glass in the transcendent haze of the bars of Manhattan. Inflamed with intoxication, loss, longing, visceral anger and celebration, Craven's poems launch the reader on a journey forward. These lyric and prose narratives should fill the jukebox in your corner bar and be played loud on a Saturday night.
"Bruce Craven is a poet of the Great Out There, transforming in large language the paths he's traveled along, paved and unpaved. These are poems of a carefully inhabited life."
"Whitman, Bukowski, the Beats, all the road-tripping, day-drinking heroes of the past are summoned forth in this long-awaited collection of primal poetry. In Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, Bruce Craven casts his vivid documentary and historical eye across the country, from Manhattan to his native Los Angeles, celebrating the 'Barbarella of exhaust pipes and road tar, ' while prosecuting American culture for a variety of 'tiny romantic crimes' - and quite a few larger ones. If Thoreau had written a Robert Rodriguez movie, this might be it. A powerhouse!"
"Bruce Craven's Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, with a cool, dead-on lyric exactitude, cajoles us deep into the mystical in-between realms of California's suburban frontiers, coyote badlands, San Gabriel and Pomona backlands, yellow Mustangs, and eucalyptus. These poems find redemption in the most unlikely of places, as they delight and disturb, and joyfully break your heart again and again."
"Craven is not your average business school professor. His use of literature and drama in his courses was influenced by his work as a poet, a journey that led to this, a remarkable collection of astonishing depth and variety. Don't let his name fool you. He's as bold a writer as they come."
"Bruce Craven carves up the American cultural frontier with a Bowie knife in this new collection. These poems burn across the map of the Ponderosa. Buena Suerte in Red Glitter should be read out loud at the edge of a canyon at sunset. He is the Weldon Kees of his generation."
