Author: Oni Buchanan
Title: What Animal
Year Published: 2003
Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): This is Buchanan's first book, winner of the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Series, a series that was recently shadowed by scandal, or at least the charge of it. I won't get into that here--if you're interested, you can google it. From what I know of Buchanan's work and the work of other authors published in the series, it focuses primarily on poetry that at least edges on the experimental or postmodern. Buchanan's collection fits; the poems are not particularly narrative, although a story or stories of pain or abuse seem to haunt the collection. The poems are extremely attentive to sound, full of phrases like "all the sand grains sorted through a sifter" (6) and--well, really, you can just open to any random page to find lines packed full of alliteration and slant rhymes--my favorite kind of rhymes.
Time Spent Reading: About 2 weeks, in the evenings
Favorites: I love the sounds in the poems in general, but my favorites are the poems in which I can grasp some kind of story. Several of the poems are from the point of view of an animal ("The Only Yak in Batesville, VA") and these I liked for their humor, the way the titles signaled the animal speaker, and their uniqueness. I just like the idea. "The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon" is another one of my favorites, about a guinea pig who sees a green balloon, falls in love with it, but pops it. Only that paraphrase makes it sound corny, but it's not at all--it's tragic, poignant, and elegant.
Questions: Some of the poems were so unattached to any kind of grounded narrative or speaker that I felt lost. I would like to know how other people interpret or process these poems. Also, this is Oni Buchanan's biography. Could she be any more accomplished? Sheesh.
The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: What stayed with me is the sound; the lines are tight, consonant-rich, and fun to read aloud. This is the kind of book that makes me feel like it's hiding its secrets, though, and that’s a turnoff for me—but I only read it once. Guinea pig poem—-beautiful.
I like the idea of story "haunting" a series of poems. Stories are so omnipresent. I'm in a scientific writing class, and one of our texts talks about telling the "story" of an experiment. Most hard scientists would probably be bothered by that idea, but the reality is that any presentation of ideas is being narrated. Anyhow -- tangent -- and the guinea pig poem does sound interesting.
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