University of Illinois Press

Nothing

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Author:

Oni Buchanan

Pub Date:

September 2008

Pages:

128 pages

Dimensions:

6.125 x 9.25 in.

Cloth edition is unjacketed

Poetry See all Subjects

Spring

A fierce collection of innovative, emotive poetry

A volume in the National Poetry Series, selected by Mark Doty

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.”

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"In this adventurous mix of taut lyrics, dramatic monologues and free-ranging typographical experiments, Buchanan, who is also a pianist, has an ear for mellifluous runs and beautifully, at times humorously, evoked emotions."--Publishers Weekly

"Buchanan writes poems that are deeply sensitive, precisely imagined, fun and beautiful. She is taking poetry where it needs to go."--Time Out New York

"Oscillates with ease and grace between the spaces of beauty and decay in the modern world."--Academy of American Poets

“‘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

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Oni Buchanan, a conservatory-trained concert pianist, is the author of the poetry collection What Animal.

University of Illinois