Spring (University of Illinois Press, 2008):
 "Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan’s Spring encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy columns of verse brush up against large-scale epics and kinetic text. Buchanan also exploits the subtleties of print typography to present poems that take every advantage of the conventional page.
This collection’s point of departure is the paradox of existence as an individual in a political and violent world. All of the formal innovations in this book have in common an urgent need for texture and polyphony, and the poems attempt to discover how to fulfill the individual human responsibility of surviving as a resiliently loving and hopeful living creature. An accompanying multimedia compact disc offers a full Flash-animated version of the printed kinetic work, the Mandrake Vehicles."
Poems from Spring Appearing On-line:
The Mandrake Vehicles (Flash-animated)
“Dear Lonely Animal” (I’m writing to you from the loneliest)
“The Lonely Animal”
“Dear Lonely Animal” (Sometimes I could just
(A)Version
Vespers
Where Are They Now, Unwilling Friends
Sublimation Attempt
What Animal (University of Georgia Press, 2003):
 “The world in What Animal is filled with uncontainable data, a rush of experiences tumbling one after the other, experiences whose logic is only that they have happened, or haven't—or worst of all, cannot be determined as having happened or not. Images—often spliced together in rapid succession, each with its distinct complex of emotional and associative content—operate in “rhymes” of shape, sound, capacity for motion, texture, number. Image patterns, sound patterns, syntactical shifts, physical spaces recur in different forms and combinations, as if, could we only comprehend, the patterns would add up to something of galactic, even infinite, dimension.”
Sample Poems from What Animal:
Minutes from the Tuesday Meeting
The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia
The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon
The Girls
The Foist Grid
Secret Arsonist [At the end of a glass eye—Omens—]
Pastoral
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