Kirjahaku

2009 Massachusetts Book Awards WinnerRepresenting 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. 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.”

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 cannot be determined as having happened or not. Images—often spliced together in rapid succession, each with a distinct complex of emotional and associative content—operate in "rhymes" of shape, sound, capacity for motion, texture, and number. Image patterns, sound patterns, syntactical shifts, and 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.

Oni Buchanan explores the problem of violence against the undefended, elemental self through a variety of emotional and linguistic responses. The violation itself is unspecified but involves the forced transformation from an instinctual, animal self, housed in the body and in the senses, into a socialised, time-based “citizen,” familiar with death, decay, and systemic injustice.This exploration plays out through the twin challenges of perception and compassion. Perception can bind us to the known world or cut us loose in dangerous, horrific territory. Compassion for other creatures (wild or domesticated, and sometimes both) is born of perception, of the hard limits and surprising insights encountered by attending to the bodies, gestures, and plights of others.In Must a Violence, the tones and personalities vary widely but trust is always placed in the five senses. These poems gather and relay extraordinary sense data, from inaudible sounds to long-absent smells. These deeply musical poems demand the reader attend to their sounds: to the waveforms, repetitions, durations, and delicate interrelationships of words.In sounding out the problem of how to respond to violence and to the betrayal and domestication of that which is wild, this book counters with aesthetic violence and disruption of its own, opening the self to the unexpected powers of the senses and to encounters between ""wildness"" and ""domestication"" within the self. Though never easy, this openness creates the possibility for an all-enveloping love that touches and joins all animals, both nonhuman and human.

As time beings, what we have is the time being, the present moment, however compromised, however shattered. Buchanan's characteristic combination of wry humor, nerve, empathy, wisdom, and outrage exposes the laughably absurd and the evisceratingly tragic all at once.