Oni Buchanan

(Kuhl House Poets, University of Iowa Press, 2020)

“‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. In Oni Buchanan’s wrenching Time Being, a formal feeling comes not after, but during pain. The last, best resource for mastering overwhelming emotion is form, and here, Buchanan invents jagged, contrapuntal forms that allow her to paradoxically organize the unorganizable—the agony of grief. Buchanan’s trademark brilliant agility with language takes on a bleaker shading in these poems, as she interrogates how syntax breaks down or is broken down by transactions. But her wizardry keeps opening up small, tenacious, miraculous expanses of hope: ‘there is not one single wonderment left,’ she writes—but her book contradicts it on every page.”

—Donna Stonecipher, author, Transaction Histories

“Like finely cut gems in startling, experimental settings, the poems of Oni Buchanan’s Time Being both attract awe and disrupt expectations. One part lamentation over love gone awry, one part comedy of late capitalism’s Orwellian absurdities, this collection of monologues offers us a world of jaggedly beautiful, bewildering forms: tours of robotically populated factories, stories of prosthetic mermaid tails, a stunning new take on Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Whoso List to Hunt.’ If Buchanan’s speaker knows all too well how corporate Darwinism makes us ‘understand the numbers are against [us]/the odds are against [us]’ she also recognizes ‘We//are each other’s/witness that we’re//alive.’ Full of mordant wit and hypnotic velocity, Time Being often takes us to a horizon we might recognize in the photographs of Hiroshi Sujimoto: facing the turbulent, primal sea, a figure confronts a ‘silence in the midst of a roar daring me to speak,’ and indeed, every poem here feels like a roaring, brilliantly managed dare.”

—Michael Tyrell, author, The Wanted

“Each poem in Oni Buchanan’s Time Being is a solitary deer, ‘wild for to hold’ and charging into ‘the howling preamble to a hurricane . . . vault[ing] beach debris . . . white gates of bramble-reaches uprooted from the scrub.’ The wreckage is uncharted, prevailing systems range from inadequate to inhumane, and the instrument of direction is a ‘sextant // calibrated to a cruel / constellation.’ The book is a reckoning between the past and the present unfolding, the light diminishing minute by minute as the speaker, poised on the brink, finally confesses her impasse: ‘Everyone’s waiting for / me to act / and I’m waiting / for me too.’ One astonishment of these poems is how they invent new containers with which to calibrate an infinite sorrow and pain and wonderment, dividing this immeasurable quantity into precise and impossible units—one ‘imperial,’ one ‘cruelty,’ one ‘cosmic distance’—in an attempt to ‘achieve the / skill set blossom- / scatter fluency’ to collapse the distance between desire and its value. ‘The problem / is the scale // of the mystery,’ Buchanan writes—and spending time inside these singular poems, we too ‘sail a chambered vacuole to the cellular edge,’ the horizon of simultaneous, irreconcilable worlds.”

—Allison Titus, author, The True Book of Animal Homes

(Kuhl House Poets, University of Iowa Press, 2012)

"Oni Buchanan’s startling new collection stages the sacred, violent, and beautiful encounter between the human and the animal, each wild, domesticated, caged, terrified, and liberated. These wondrously inflamed poems recall the eerie worlds of early Plath, yet the pleading, enraged, but ultimately tender voice is entirely Buchanan’s."
— Thomas Heise, associate professor of English, McGill University

"There is a road that winds from Buchanan’s masterful, animal ear to her strange and magnificent heart that is unlike any road ever traveled. It is the road the most fragile creatures—Violence and Mourning—take to bring themselves home. Buchanan is my favorite species of poet: the rarest of the real."
— Sabrina Orah Mark, author, The Babies

"Must a Violence is a gorgeous ode to the infinitely unnoticed sounds and movements of the world. From hearing 'the flank of a fish creak' to feeling the 'presence underneath' a woman’s hair, this book gives us the world inside of the world, the sensory experience beneath and beyond even the deepest reaches of our days. No other poet writes like Oni Buchanan."
— Katie Ford, author, Colosseum

"Must a Violence has an ethical music beneath its desire, lines 'ricocheting from one elastic / possibility to the next.' These possibilities must be heard, as courageously as Oni Buchanan fiercely gives them to us here, today and now."
— Major Jackson, Richard Dennis Green & Gold Professor, University of Vermont

(University of Illinois Press, 2008)

“‘What makes the beauty of a shattered thing?’ reads a line kerneled inside Oni Buchanan’s wildly inventive Spring, a question thrusting up through the poem like an emergent seedling. Beauty and shatter are everywhere in this book. It's no surprise to learn that Buchanan is a classical pianist; the dazzling mathematics of her forms reach for sounds we've not heard yet, and her playful improvisations travel—with humor, heart, and unfailing nerve—back to the Metaphysicals, Dickinson, and Cummings, and forward into uncharted territory.”
— Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

(University of Georgia Press, 2003)

"Buchanan's work undertakes an encounter with all that is desperately, and strictly, and unavoidably, patterned—all that, inside and outside us, will not cease to pattern us...It is an inquiry undergone with such urgency, accuracy, and intensity that one grows astonished, even a bit afraid...Frequencies of all kinds (musical, erotic, neurophysical, biological, mathematical) merge to inflict their objective truths on the flesh and heart of this animal we call our 'human' being. At times it seems this poet is able to speak from a place closer to the dangerous heart of evolution than anyone has ever attempted, her exploration of the mechanical nature of desire and the desiring face of the inhuman arriving at a ferociously beautiful visionary understanding—hallucinatory, scientific, vatic, and filled with deep longing, sadness, and pathos."
— Jorie Graham, author of Never

"These poems are like road maps that have been creased and spilled on, so that the experience is one of rupture and loss of direction. The poems exude a knowledge of pain, physical and psychological, and the poems themselves are ways to extract and heal the pain quickly. The animal body, suffering."
— Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible

"Oni Buchanan's stunning poems give voice to the animal that is bred by grief, a creature whose experience of private calamity can be neither named nor forgotten. 'They send me out on an errand for the words,' she writes. Aching and beautiful and brutal and often self-brutalizing, the poems in What Animal are astonishing evidence of the clairvoyance of the bereaved."
— Mark Levine, author of Enola Gay