Chimera by Brad Buchanan

In CHIMERA, Brad Buchanan explores the multi-valanced meanings of his title—from the mythical and monstrous to the fanciful to the genetic—while he chronicles a harrowing journey through the daily indignities of a body at war with itself. With influences as diverse as Shakespeare and Dickinson, these compelling poems are as cerebral as they are carnal, combining in chimerical fashion the painful and miraculous details that comprise “the raw / fact of survival.”

–Joshua McKinney, author of MAD CURSIVE (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2012) and SMALL SILLION (Parlor Press, 2018)

Brad Buchanan‘s painfully stunning new collection, CHIMERA, continues his explorations of the monstrosities that cancer can create in the lives of human beings as they struggle through invasive testing, treatments, recovery, and the hope of being cancer-free that stem cell transplants offer. Buchanan…documents, reports, questions, disputes both himself and the world cancer and chimerism force him to confront. He helps us see and feel in a most visceral way what it means—for him, for us, for those he loves and those who love him—to be engaged in this struggle. “Cancer is not your standard bully, / it will not back down if confronted / with sufficiently brave defiance. / It doesn’t have a nervous system / to mobilize or sympathize. / The only martial arts it knows/ are patience, stealth and resilience.” These poems will surprise you with their tenacity, empathy and ingenious language.

–Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of SPIDER SEASON (Cold River Press, 2016) and GRAVITATIONAL TUG (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020)

CHIMERA is Brad Buchanan’s poetry of recovery after the medical and emotional ordeals he detailed so powerfully in his previous collection THE SCARS, ALIGNED (Finishing Line Press, 2019). The visceral realism and honesty of that volume are once again on display… two bitter, glittering prose poems bring Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lear into the hospital to anatomize collapsing bodies and minds, in cynical and often hilarious tones… And some of the finest poems in the volume are the stunning pastiches of Emily Dickinson, who has given Buchanan a stanza that works like a knife edge to pare away all the sentiment and obscurity of an approach to—and a last-minute shying away—from death… The bleakest poems here could not have been written except from the perspective of a survivor husband and father, catching his breath in the outside world, looking back in astonishment… noticing the world of the healthy and loving and beautiful again.

–Brian Trehearne, Professor of Canadian Literature, McGill University