What Animal: Poems

by Oni Buchanan

The world in What Animal is filled with uncontainable data, a rush of experiences tumbling one after the other, experiences whose logic is only that they have happened, or cannot be determined as having happened or not. Images―often spliced together in rapid succession, each with a distinct complex of emotional and associative content―operate in "rhymes" of shape, sound, capacity for motion, texture, and number. Image patterns, sound patterns, syntactical shifts, and physical spaces recur in different forms and combinations, as if, could we only comprehend, the patterns would add up to something of galactic, even infinite, dimension.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Val Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read. Thought-provoking. The magical draped in the everyday. These poems stay with me, haunt me--or I haunt them; I'm not sure which one.

[amy jarvis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alive and rich with spring days and oddities, and equally vibrant with introspection.

[Christina Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thomas Sayers Ellis loaned this to me to read. I'm not sure why. I like a few of the poems, but overall I found it rather dull.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful vocabulary.