Brad Buchanan is Professor Emeritus in English at Sacramento State University. His poetry, fiction and scholarly articles have appeared in nearly 200 journals, and he has published two book-length collections of poetry The Miracle Shirker (2005) and Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter(2008) as well as two academic books. He was diagnosed with T-Cell lymphoma in February 2015 and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016. He is currently in remission.
The Differential Diagnoses the alphabet once scattered throughout my blood has metastasized producing a poem: “Cancer and its Early Equivocations” a subcutaneous haiku sequence individual nodules linked mainly by their distinctive form perhaps only the harmless conceit of an overly active imagination but something in me wants the capital T-cell truth to be spelled out accurately at last in all its baroque malignancy give me straight talk in off-rhyme and halting measure or an epigram even with murderous closure |
