Spring

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.”