Oni Buchanan has published two previous books of poetry, Spring and What Animal. She is a concert pianist who actively performs across the U.S. and abroad, and is the founder and director of Ariel Artists, a Boston-based management company that represents a national roster of classical and contemporary-classical musicians pursuing visionary performance projects.

Other poems by Oni Buchanan in Verse Daily:
July 24, 2009:   "Then From Our Green Branch" "then the "safety net" they held..."

Books by Oni Buchanan:

Other poems on the web by Oni Buchanan:
"Like a Near Fold"
"Dear Lonely Animal"
Two poems
"When All the Leaves"
Two poems
"The Occupation"
Four poems

Oni Buchanan's Website.

Oni Buchanan According to Wikipedia.

About Must a Violence:

"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

"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

"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

"There is a road that winds from Buchanan’s masterful, animal ear to her strange and magnificent heart that is unlike any road ever traveled. It is the road the most fragile creatures—Violence and Mourning—take to bring themselves home. They are the ones who must most be, because it is they who mark our cry to exist and our hide from extinction. Buchanan is my favorite species of poet: the rarest of the real."
—Sabrina Orah Mark