cran

cran is a weird book, a good thing. It isn't a very recognizable thing when you actually slow down and look at it in the way it asks for. It has many of the familiar moves and gestures of US contemporary poetry, but what they're being used to hold is...not familiar. It's uncomfortable, like you will be if you learn to look in this way. "Nor even the way the birds are comfortable." These are poems that are cold and also brightly red, shifty and also sincere: the cranberry is truly both tenor and vehicle, as is the life/consciousness the "I" allows. "Able to survive the cold in/and be made alive by/water and food/The most important element is air." The intelligence is quizzical, organismal, like the consciousness of a bird feeling pain and curiosity. "A living thing does/not consider," it just is. cran is doing the strange and difficult work of trying to be alive in an unfamiliar way. -Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, author of sundaey

Personal and evocative, this complex, meaningful work gives readers words to taste in our throat, like the poet's "Cranberry Vodkas with no extra sugar" at his remembered New Year. Eads invites us into a world where "we are both alive" and we are welcome. -Ernestine Shaankaláxt Hayes, author of Blonde Indian & The Tao of Raven

The poems of Eran Eads' cran face the natural world, enter the bog of being, and make a kind of beauty we've never seen made before. "Life / spindles, and the sand, and / the sand and then the discovery! I have kept myself." Sparkling with brilliance and tenderness, Eads' lyric poems take us, over and over, out to where love is ripe and waiting for us. -Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave

Eran Eads is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and completed a BA & a BT at University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is attending University of Maryland as a Performance Studies PhD student and is the author of fat, a chapbook.