Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, Craven Bruce

Buena Suerte in Red Glitter offers lyrical and prose narratives as authentic as Johnny Cash songs. His poetry has the edge and enthusiasm of a writer that thrashed to favorite bands and dove off a few stages in younger days. Also drawing on his So-Cal youth, Craven remembers drinking Hawaiian Punch at the Presbyterian Church and riding his Sting-Ray down the fire-trails, and leaning against his backpack in the mountains above Los Angeles, seduced by unprotected sky, a much better choice than having to watch time breed endlessly in a twilight of algebra class. In Manhattan, Cravens poems dive into what is lost in messy desire. Hungry passion disconnected from love transforms the poet into a werewolf: Last nights prey just your memory. The betrayals bring pain as he moves back and forth from Los Angeles and New York City: A hawk cries against the sky somewhere in Hollywood. Here in New York, I waited for the sun with a glass. Like you once waited for me. But his poems also capture the joys that survive the hurt: I have heard you plead, Cmon Hurry And I have crawled to you like a man. Shimmering with intoxication, loss, longing, and moments of sharp anger and celebration, the poets searching finds a way forward. His experiences have a cost, but he reminds himself after a cross-country road-trip to listen and rest, then awake in a sun-splashed afternoon: a baptized stranger in the normal world.