The Kuhl House Poets series of the University of Iowa Press released two new collections on Oct. 1, Must a Violence by UI alumna Oni Buchanan and Meme by Susan Wheeler.
Buchanan explores the problem of violence against the undefended, elemental self through a variety of emotional and linguistic responses. The violation itself is unspecified but involves the forced transformation from an instinctual, animal self, housed in the body and in the senses, into a socialized, time-based “citizen,” familiar with death, decay, and systemic injustice.
Thomas Heise of McGill University wrote, "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.”
Buchanan, who simultaneously pursued a master’s degree in piano performance and a Master of Fine Arts in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has published two previous books of poetry—Spring, a Nation Poetry Series selection, and What Animal, winner of the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Competition.
She is also a concert pianist who performs across the United States and abroad, and she 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.
Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love. A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation.
Examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, “are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
Wheeler is the author of the poetry collections Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America and was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Smokes, which won the Four Way Books Award in 1998; and Source Codes.
Her work has appeared in seven editions of the anthology Best American Poetry as well as in the Paris Review, London Review of Books, Verse, Talisman, The New Yorker, and many other journals. She is on the creative writing faculties at Princeton University and the New School's graduate program.
Like the historic stone building, home of the UI Press, from which this series draws its name, the Kuhl House Poets combine the best of dedicated craft and contemporary vision. This provocative series reawakens readers to a fresh consideration of the possibilities of language and feeling by publishing work that is formally and verbally inventive, adventurous work that takes its own path outside established routes of either traditions or experimental poetry.
The new books is available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.
For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events, visit the new Arts Iowa website.