“‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. In Oni Buchanan’s wrenching Time Being, a formal feeling comes not after, but during pain. The last, best resource for mastering overwhelming emotion is form, and here, Buchanan invents jagged, contrapuntal forms that allow her to paradoxically organize the unorganizable—the agony of grief. Buchanan’s trademark brilliant agility with language takes on a bleaker shading in these poems, as she interrogates how syntax breaks down or is broken down by transactions. But her wizardry keeps opening up small, tenacious, miraculous expanses of hope: ‘there is not one single wonderment left,’ she writes—but her book contradicts it on every page.”
—Donna Stonecipher, author, Transaction Histories

“Like finely cut gems in startling, experimental settings, the poems of Oni Buchanan’s Time Being both attract awe and disrupt expectations. One part lamentation over love gone awry, one part comedy of late capitalism’s Orwellian absurdities, this collection of monologues offers us a world of jaggedly beautiful, bewildering forms: tours of robotically populated factories, stories of prosthetic mermaid tails, a stunning new take on Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Whoso List to Hunt.’ If Buchanan’s speaker knows all too well how corporate Darwinism makes us ‘understand the numbers are against [us]/the odds are against [us]’ she also recognizes ‘We//are each other’s/witness that we’re//alive.’ Full of mordant wit and hypnotic velocity, Time Being often takes us to a horizon we might recognize in the photographs of Hiroshi Sujimoto: facing the turbulent, primal sea, a figure confronts a ‘silence in the midst of a roar daring me to speak,’ and indeed, every poem here feels like a roaring, brilliantly managed dare.”
—Michael Tyrell, author, The Wanted