Three sisters live in a rental house on a gravel road in a forgotten pocket of Portland. A little half-brother is a preschooler.

Their mother, worn from days on her feet as a checker for Fred Meyer, is barely present. Their father, just released from prison on a burglary conviction, is hardly present, either, although he wants to be.

This is a family on the edge of poverty, or maybe immersed in it, where dinner is mac and cheese and hot dogs, and the Thanksgiving feast includes canned green beans and Stove Top stuffing.

The oldest daughter is Sara, a gifted soccer player never sure of her position in the world. Middle sister Elaine fuels her insecurity with food, while she carefully curates her clothing and jewelry. Rachel, the poet, the reader, is arcing away from the family to be with an abusive boyfriend.

The action in Mark Pomeroy’s tale of three sisters, The Tigers of Lents, published this spring by the University of Iowa Press, begins in 2010. Pomeroy was a writer in residence at Southeast Portland’s Marshall High School in 2011, when the Portland School Board voted to close the school the children of Lents attended.

“To say that was a poignant time is about as much understatement as I can manage,” Pomeroy, 55, said in an interview. “It was the last thing that community needed.”

The Lents community, centered around the intersection of 92nd Avenue and Foster Road, had already been riven by the construction of the Interstate 205 freeway in the ’70s. That essentially chopped the community in half.

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And now, the high school.

Pomeroy had a memorable student in 2010, a “feisty” soccer player, and over the intervening years he fleshed out her story and added the rest of the family.

The Garrison sisters live in Lents, but their stories take them all over Portland. Sara and a friend drive downtown to cruise Broadway on a weekend night. She takes the yellow and green lines of the MAX light-rail between Lents and the idyllic North Portland campus of the University of Portland, where she clings to a soccer scholarship. Elaine has a job wearing a mouse costume at Chuck E. Cheese, a breathtakingly awful venue popular for children’s birthday parties.

The sisters are aware of the now gone and unlamented New Copper Penny bar situated on Foster Road, but they never visit the nearby Mall 205 or Clackamas Town Center. “My imagination went to the pull of downtown,” Pomeroy explains.

Their travels and travails are punctuated with a playlist of iconic ‘80s songs from a CD collection left behind when their father went to jail.

Here’s their little brother, dancing to one of them:

Adam, post-bath, has put on his T. rex underwear over his pants, his yellow T-shirt that says CAMP SHERMAN, OREGON, his green rubber boots with the frog eyes and red tongue, and one of his night diapers over his head. He’s hopping around and dancing in the front room to Def Leppard’s ‘Photograph,’ and Sara has to go tickle him and tell him to keep it down some, Mama has a headache.

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In the South Park Blocks, Rachel befriends an old man, a reader, and they share book recommendations. Portland — downtown, Hawthorne, University of Portland — is its own character in The Tigers of Lents. If you’ve lived in this city, you know these places. You know what Pomeroy means when he writes: “The river smells like warmed aluminum foil.”

Here’s Sara reflecting on the “never-ending drama in her family”:

You go out into the world and find yourself changing, in big and small ways, you experience so much, new ideas, new emotions, in such a short time, and then bam — you go back, even for just the short visits, and it’s like at times you meet your old self who never left, who stayed back there, trapped in the old ways, all that suffering, maybe even proud of that shit.

Banked fires don’t always glow on the surface, and the tiger nature of these girls isn’t palpable. But it is there within, a very human yearning, a burning, a source of despair and hope. Each girl is fierce in her own way, overt, quiet, convoluted. Each is holding on to her heart, trying, growing, failing, overcoming.

The world is not doing any of the Garrisons any favors. It’s up to them to hold on or to take the next steps, to make it to school; to stand for hours, asking customers if they found everything they needed; to try so hard in soccer practice that you vomit; to hold down a post-prison job at a plant nursery. Living as tigers means ignoring the constant refrain that you are poor, you aren’t good enough, you aren’t one of us, you are forgotten.

But they forget: You aren’t kittens. You are tigers.

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Portland author Brian Doyle, an early mentor, once told Pomeroy, “What we’re after is the shimmering center.” Pomeroy took that to mean the truth of a scene or a character.

There is much that shimmers in The Tigers of Lents.

Pomeroy’s book is an immersive read — the intertwined lives, the overarching message of hope. Nobody is perfect, nothing is perfect. This is one of those books that helps explain why.