Oni Buchanan has published two previous books of poetry, Spring and What Animal. An actively performing concert pianist, she is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a management company that represents classical and contemporary-classical musicians. (Author photo by Jon Woodward)
"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
"Given the on-going, increasingly sensuous relationship between man and machine, 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
"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. And I don’t think anyone ever could."
—Katie Ford
University of Iowa Press
