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Open Books: Events
April 28, 2009 07:30 PM
ONI BUCHANAN & JON WOODWARD
Spring ($17.95 Univ. of Illinois), Oni Buchanan’s second book, presents a truly remarkable poetic range. An almost Victorian study of creation -- “the canopy of green in crazed array, and beneath // all the small animals going about their gatherings and errands” – is followed by an achingly gorgeous series of poems addressing the bravado and sadness of loneliness. The book comes with a Flash-animation CD that presents a series of vividly fluid erasures. Her writing can be comic and surreal, as if in a fairy tale: a man who has torn open his chest, ravens then flying from his heart, is asked, “Are more ravens in those ravens’ hearts?”
John Woodward’s second collection, Rain ($14 Wave) offers up a charming series of stream-of-consciousness poems. His masterful use of enjambment, syntax, and lineation keeps the stream flowing beautifully -- “the / eye never has enough / of seeing nor the ear its / fill of hearing this too / is meaningless a chasing after / the wind I stood still / next to the bed inside / the world as inside a / glacier creeping forward will it / grind us in its works.” Philosophy and the drama and mundanity of the world are woven throughout the book to great effect.
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