Lately I have been reading two books centered on love and illness, both set in Midtown Sacramento. The first is my new friend Brad Buchanan’s poetry collection The Birds of Poverty Ridge, just released through Finishing Line Press. The second is the illustrated autobiographical “novel in stories” Body in Script by Eve Imagine, an obviously-very-cool person I recently encountered wading through the large crowd at the Sacramento Book Festival, an event organized by my old friend Scott Coatsworth.
I like both books for several reasons. One is that Buchanan, an emeritus English professor at CSU Sacramento, and Imagine, an adjunct English professor at Sacramento City College, both find decisive ways to embrace the hot, tree-filled landscape of urban Sacramento. I admire this decisiveness, in part because Sacramento is a place that’s so hard to interpret. This is a city-region that people both correctly and wildly incorrectly understand as a flat, provincial state government town; a place people describe as the “Midwest of California” and in doing so pay an unwitting complement to the Midwest. Greater Sacramento, I’ve come to believe, is the true face of the emerging America. Imagine a giant, casual, mostly successful backyard barbeque for two million people with ancestors from practically every corner of the globe.
But if Sacramento is more sophisticated and much more diverse than most outsiders are aware, it is also a place where I’ve encountered some chronic professional frustrations and sometimes felt a bit trapped. My recent novel is set in Los Angeles, and a little bit in New York. A place in my soul, I suppose, yearns for a big mercantile city. The native Seattleite in me, certainly, aches for more hills. I won’t apologize for any of this. But perhaps Buchanan and Imagine show me a literary way forward that hews closer to the reality of my chosen life in the hot, fecund Sacramento Valley.
Did I say it gets a tad warm and plantish here? Here are a couple of stanzas from Buchanan’s poem “The Paradoxes of Poverty Ridge” that touch on one flavor of this (note that the quote function on Word Press won’t handle proper line breaks and indentations, especially in the mobile version):
“Here the gardener comes on Fridays
to fill up the bin;
here the backyard bursts with sweetness
that the rats consume.Here I gather strength for a journey
stubbornly postponed;
here I shelter from the daily
devastating sun.”
I love how Buchanan gives emotional flavor to the physical landscape experience of a Sacramento backyard, with its typical cornucopia of fruit and typical urban river rats. But I especially love the way in which The Birds of Poverty Ridge as a whole shines clear, and yes, devastating sunlight on Buchanan’s experiences of cancer and divorce, and his shift to a new life in a new neighborhood.
If you aren’t from Sacramento, and loosely in keeping with the urban analysis theme of this blog, you might want to know that Poverty Ridge is in fact a very real neighborhood, not just a metaphor. Both words in the neighborhood’s name are ironic. The “ridge,” a relative term in elevation-starved Sacramento, is a maybe 30-foot high undulation, no taller I would guess than the levees that annually hold winter floodwaters back from the city grid. The houses that line this undulation are old and elegant. In some cases they are also a bit gone to seed; but still, it’s clear that Poverty Ridge was one of early Sacramento’s richer neighborhoods. Sacramento’s most famous literary daughter, Joan Didion, famously spent her junior and senior years in high school on Poverty Ridge, in a stately, vaguely Old South-looking two story “wedding cake” of a home at the corner of 22nd and T Streets.
Eve Imagine, like Buchanan, also gets us into intimate touch with Midtown Sacramento backyards. In “Plumbing,” one of the most affecting stories in her novel, the speaker in the book (Chava) and her husband (Stephen) confront a backyard plumbing disaster caused by the disintegration of a sewer line made from “Orangeburg.” I’m all too familiar with Orangeburg, a piping material made effectively of cardboard, because the stuff is so common to this region.
We ended up paying for a plumber to fix the Orangeburg problem at our original house in Sacramento, a solution facilitated in our case by access to the high wages and free insurance that come to US health care system insiders. But Chava and Stephen lack the money to go the easy route, so Stephen ends up trenching into the night and, over time, across the alley into their neighbor’s backyard. Imagine describes this process with the same warm gallows humor and deep gratitude for her husband she brings to the myriad health problems described in Body in Script.
“I’m ready again, and with my shovel I pound on a root for what feels like ten minutes but is more likely two. I sit on the ground, grinning, shaking my head, holding my knees with my hands. I tilt my head back up at Stephen. We’re both covered in sweaty filth, my hair a mix of frizz, grease, and muck. His head still blonde, blonder than seems possible for a grown man, is streaked with dirt. He’s smiling. I smile back. He bends down and finds my lips, gives me a peck. ‘Go. Eat. Take a break,’ he says.”
It’s the many passages like this one that make me say Imagine’s novel is a love story; not only a fictionalized medical memoir, though it is that too. But I think Buchanan’s book is also a love story, if a nontraditional one, a brave chronicle not only of romantic love lost but also of the poet’s parental love for his daughters, all wrapped in a tale of finding heart to move forward with an independent life. Sometimes these forms of love are expressed tightly together, as in the poem “Blood Oranges,” also set in a Sacramento backyard. The poem, placed early in the mostly chronologically arranged collection, describes Buchanan’s experience gathering windfall oranges after a storm (again, with apologies for the funky line breaks and indentation issues on the mobile version).
“The aromatic and beautiful damage
I gather painfully in the wild weather
is a foretaste of springtime,
an echo of summer.Those that split least
will yield the juice I offer my daughters
and my wife, who will scarcely guess
how high the winds blew, or what wonderful
wreckage I’ve made of my life.”
But even though both The Birds of Poverty Ridge and Body in Script are in one way centrally about love, they are also centrally about illness. This is a theme I sometimes notice that I don’t like to think about, despite having just passed through a strange, hallucinatory year recovering from cancer here in Sacramento. I’ve written a good number of poems about this cancer experience. But still, I admire the way both Buchanan and Imagine so wholeheartedly lean into the experience of bodily difficulty and fragility. Here, for instance, Imagine turns an insurance rejection letter into a fascinating paragraph. (Changes in font are my imperfect attempts to mirror prettier font shifts in the original.)
“At the top of the list of my priors, following the History of collapsed lung and pneumonia, comes the hardest one to look at, my failure: Treatment for eating disorder, anorexia. At first, I saw Dr. Berkowitz three times a week. I was binging and purging so often…”
I’ll let you make the wise choice of buying Imagine’s book so she can tell you the daily binge and purge number that comes next (rest assured you get one). But I don’t want to wait to tell you how, just following this passage, Imagine describes her own experience of life with illness as “precarious.” I can say from experience that precarious is an especially good word for how it feels to have a serious illness.
But what interests me most about this passage, beyond the incorporation of corporate medico insurance-speak into an almost prose poem, is how the passage, and Imagine’s novel as a whole, operates as a subtle critique of how our unjust, overpriced health care system makes people’s lives even more precarious than they need to be. Perhaps if I had a critique of Body in Script it might be that this critique is too subtle; that the book shies away too much from a call to put an end to American health care exceptionalism. But on the other hand, Body in Script does a great job of “showing not telling.” Very possibly this is for the best.
I’ll give the last word to Brad here, describing his personal experience of illness in one of the most powerful stanzas of The Birds of Poverty Ridge.
“a sick man has no use for the truth
he only wants what will bring him death
or a pleasant and convenient berth
on a spaceship bound for a second earth”
We are all lucky to have the chance to learn from Buchanan as he makes sense of his surprise of a new life, listening to the urban birdsong on Poverty Ridge, his very own unique second earth.
(Again, buy the The Birds of Poverty Ridge here and Body in Script here)