Year of Plagues audiobook

Prostate Cancer in the Time of PandemicThe author is a poet and a professor of English and Creative writing. He has crafted an incredible intellectual and emotional tale of his encounter with cancer. It crosses lines between the black experience and western culture. From Motown to Dylan. from Kendrick Lamar to Bob Marley.His broad knowledge and erudition shine brightly through his writing. He even evokes Shakespeare, Ian Mckellan and Patrick Stewart. And then, in a powerful passage, he views his cancer as the metaphorical equivalent of the killers of Emmet Till and George Floyd. Prostate cancer does not have a grip on the public imagination as several other types of cancer do. But his description of his experience is a vivid one and worthy of reading.

I’m inspired by this tapestry of memoir and treatise, of poetry and politics – with deep heartbeats of passion running through it all. It's very specific to 2020 and in many ways it has timeless reverberations.There is something for me about D’Aguiar’s poetic response to the world that feels like opening up space, where neat boxes and stories and constructs might otherwise be a wall that blocks opportunities. In this spacious world it’s quite normal to fight cancer in a reggae beat. It is natural to compare cancer to Covid-19. And to feel how both of these plagues replicate aspects of the centuries-old scourge of racism.The author brings the full might of his anger towards racism, particularly as the world begins to face up to ongoing systemic racism with George Floyd’s murder, and for many people to really say “Enough. No More.”Like me, he goes through his cancer journey about the same time as Covid-19 grabs the whole world by the scruff of its neck. With Covid and cancer, the dance is more complicated – clearly the cancer grows in the body of its victim, and stands to kill itself along with the death of its host. And Covid is so obviously a form of “social cancer.” D’Aguiar only sketches the lightest outline of his cancer, but this is enough to know it is prostate cancer and that it is Stage 4 (spread beyond the prostate) by the time he begins treatment. The book closes without any certainty about his post-operative outlook, and that seems appropriate, at least to me as a prostate cancer survivor. Once you have cancer you do indeed never know if it will return or whether it will kill you, at least until it your end is very close.In this atmosphere of uncertainty, D’Aguiar makes some important distinctions. “I want doubt in my life as an aid, not as an insurmountable hurdle,” he says. The good doubt for him is about being with uncertainty. This good doubt includes both respecting and doubting the medical model of cancer enough to both take all the scientific tests and treatments available. Yet to engage in other self-driven remedies of healthy diet and emotional health and music and fitness and more. The doubt he chooses not to embrace includes deciding not to “live every hour as if it is my last.” There is something I love about his choice to embrace life with so much passion. And with the space that creates, he sings, he writes poetry, he hears ancient rhythms calling him to solace.And not just ancient rhythms! The way he sets a song about his PSMA test to the Village People’s YMCA had me laughing out loud.One place where I have empathy with him, but chose a different route, is in telling my loved ones. He chooses to tell only his wife and children, but not his mother or his siblings or his best friend. I respect this choice and I personally believe that cancer thrives in darkness. Disclosure, particularly of prostate cancer, to me helps to push back that darkness not just for the man diagnosed with the cancer but for all the other men whose cancer is undiagnosed and undiscussable.

FIVE YEARS AGO, just about to the day, I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. I had surgery the following April, and it was successful--no sign of recurrence so far, knock wood. In 2017-18 there was plenty to read about prostate cancer, but it was of the practical variety, How to Survive Prostate Cancer, and so on. Useful, obviously, but as a reading kind of person I was hoping for something like Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals or Anne Boyer's The Undying--i.e., something about the experience of having it written by a person who could really write.I wanted this book, basically, and now here it is. D'Aguiar is a novelist and poet, "born in London to Guyanese parents," as it says in the jacket copy. He grew mainly with his grandparents in Guyana, came back to England a a young man, and has been resident in the USA for quite a while; he teaches creative writing at UCLA. I haven't read any of his books before this one, although I have seen occasional pieces by him in Conjunctions. It's not a practical guide sort of book--it does not explain what your Gleason score means, for instance, or how laparoscopic surgery is performed, or anything of that sort. It's excellent, though, on all the topics that the practical guides ignore. What is it like to have a potentially mortal illness that has no symptoms--to have a hostile familiar dwelling inside you that you know about only because a doctor has told you that you have it? What is it like having the operation that will deal this hostile familiar, an operation that will utterly change the circumstances of your life, but during which you will be perfectly unconscious, after which you will have no memories? How do you manage the three months before they check your PSA again, the three months during which you will not know whether the operation made a difference for not? D'Aguiar had the added fillip of going through all this during the COVID lockdown months. I did not have to deal with that, praise the Lord. But reading this book was like reliving one of my life's strangest episodes. I never thought of myself as a "cancer survivor," but I did have cancer, and I am still here, so I guess I am one, and this book was what I needed to get me to shake hands with that identity.

My first thought? Oh my, rarely have I encountered such beautiful prose. While this is not a book of poetry, D'Aguiar applies his talents as a poet full force to this gripping, non-fiction tale of his experience with stage 4 cancer. The language is beyond beautiful, the expressions and metaphors fresh and visual, giving us a voyeuristic lens into his lightening fast, creative brain. In one instance where he envisions his life as a single long ski jump in which he hopes to outrun cancer, he writes of his body as "A suit that does not have a season. ... I breathe and I picture my past as if loaded into the tongue of a slingshot and catapulted forward ahead of me... Now bring out your tape measure and tell me how far I floated in the ski jump of my life; how big that suit must be to cover me." Memories, current struggles, and philosophical questions intermingle in these pages and spill forth ebulliently, allowing the reader to ride the waves of emotion along with the author as he attempts to gain a stable foothold among the quickly shifting sands of his life. He hates the cancer, he blesses the cancer, he rages against it and then accepts it, only to rage again a few pages later. He trusts in modern medicine and science but also embraces an artist's approach to his disease, including yoga, dance, and meditation. Year of Plagues is not a diary, yet it is one of the most honest, revelatory offerings of human experience I've come across. I occasionally stumbled upon sections that I felt could have used a bit of tightening, but I must give this book five stars for its sheer force of honest revelation and glorious language.

Was able to skip over a lot of extraneous fluff