The Scars, Aligned by Brad Buchanan

Forced to an intimacy with the body’s deep mechanisms, its betrayals and resilience, in The Scars, Aligned Brad Buchanan chronicles his battle with cancer, a journey through a personal hell where malady and cure sound alike. This powerful book offers an unflinching portrait of one man’s encounter with mortality, “the capital / T-cell truth.” In poems that convey a terrible urgency, we glimpse the daily struggle between fear and hope, the periods of crushing isolation, and the resulting questions of how does one keep hope alive, how does one survive? For Buchanan, the answer lies in the love of friends and family, and further, in conversation with his poetic forebears, in the redemptive power of language. For anyone who has ever questioned the utility of poetry, these poems stand defiant. In “Miracle,” the speaker recounts hearing about a woman whose infertility was cured by her treatment for ovarian cancer: “I listened dumbstruck / to her story / and wondered what / new birth / my sickness might / bring me.” The beautiful and moving poems of The Scars, Aligned are that birth, and it is miraculous.

–Joshua McKinney, author of Mad Cursive and The Novice Mourner

Brad Buchanan’s muscular third collection of poems, The Scars, Aligned, holds you in its fierce grasp as ruthlessly as the near-fatal lymphoma the speaker endures. This is not just a collection about a young father’s trial by cancer and his emergence back to the world of the living; this is a book where the power of mortality writes itself through the transfiguration of its human host. In ‘Thanksgiving,’ Buchanan writes, “yes/I will give this thanks/to cancer/for showing me/that something in nature/needs me to live out/its tragedy/more urgently than I could ever/live out my own truth/ in my own time…”  Thanks to Buchanan for letting us this close to such a searing truth.

–Julia Levine, author of Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU Press 2014), awarded the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry

Brad Buchanan’s poems prove that reading and writing poetry can help us make sense of the senselessness of cancer.

–Susan Gubar, author of the column “Living With Cancer” in The New York Times (electronic edition)

Brad Buchanan has written with fierceness, tenderness, bafflement, and frightening honesty about his own experience of cancer and the rounds of painstaking and painful treatment that brought him through it. One of the great surprises and great pleasures of The Scars, Aligned is the intermittent presence of humour and wit, whether it is the delightful voice of scandalized literary authorities in “Acceptance Notice,” or a brilliant zeugma in “Vagal,” or the “unforgettable” comparison of first sex and first suppository in “Unforgettable,” or the supreme conceit that governs “A Cancer Patient’s Guide to Hockey.” The poet’s body is the subject and the display of these poems, but it is the enduring well-being of his mind that moves us most.

–Brian Trehearne, Professor of Canadian Literature, McGill University