An enticing second collection by Danielle Pafunda, MY ZORBA is a mysterious, memoirish confabulation of missives narrating the dark domestic drama of the speaker and one shape-shifting Zorba. Is Zorba lover? Sister? Captor? Uncanny double? And does the story end in a bloody accident or intentional poisoning? Danielle Pafunda is the author of PRETTY YOUNG THING (Soft Skull, 2005), and the chapbook A PRIMER FOR CYBORGS: THE CORPSE (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, forthcoming). Her poems have been chosen three times for Best American Poetry (2004, 2006, and 2007) and appeared widely in journals. She is coeditor of the online journal La Petite Zine, a doctoral candidate in the University of Georgia's creative writing program, and Spring 2008 Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. See daniellepafunda.blogspot.com for more information.

My Zorba

Literature & Fiction

Pafunda, Danielle

Poetry

Bloof Books

Poetry. "Danielle Pafunda is a sick twist. I read her for seer and scar. She sees and scars, most especially my insides. MANHATER doesn't hate so much as it confounds. It mixes me up: finding-me-with its scathing, tight phrases, bit-off and spit-out with the kind of venom you don't manufacture because you're born-with. It finds-me-with its horrormother, a figure both ick and sympathet-ick, both grotesque and ingrown, mommydearest of nightmare and mirror. It finds-me-with its plates of illness—china and petri, 'shard and glisten'—and with its ex-lovers: weep boys and beardeds and dog ones. Always, Pafunda finds-me-with something. I'm always ashamed. And always, always I'm smiling."—Kirsten Kaschock"Danielle Pafunda is at it again, thank goodness: saying what almost no one else will say, as only she can say it. Read her for the reality check; come back for the rhetorical rocket fuel. These poems ask: Can you recognize yourself in Mommy? Can you recognize yourself in the mirror? MANHATER collects the language of the body, the body, the body. The world lurking in its pages 'expels symmetry,' 'surveys...the sunrise / barf,' invites the 'bitch seizure,' will 'shard and glisten' for you. Enter and 'wait for the tremble.'"—Evie Shockley"To read Danielle Pafunda's MANHATER is to occupy a world of exuberantly dreadful, vibrantly horrifying sentences about decay, death, 'penumbral scuzz,' and the parasites that live in the parasites that live in the basest bodies among us. In Pafunda's mantis-like narrator, I hear 'jolly worms' and 'sarcophagus parties.' I hear exhilaration in destruction, in 'gasping bodies of doom.' The speaker in these poems might destroy the love she touches, but in the process she excretes with a syntax that's dazzlingly scary: a direct delivery of humanimal emission; an infection of flesh and body; sentences that discharge what's magically repulsive in carcass, fungus, milk, blood, and goo. Here there is composition in decomposition, spasms of sparkle and rot."—Daniel Borzutzky

Manhater

Dusie Press

The fifth poetry collection by Danielle Pafunda, Natural History Rape Musuem centers around an unnamed speaker and her intimate/adversary, the fuckwad, in pieces interrupted (or violated) by their boxed-in titles. Further interrupting this narrative are a prose sequence and a menagerie of objects/animals/elements borne as totems by the speaker-a lump of coal, a stingray, a cord of wood, a wolf spider, an earthworm, the fly. The volume culminates in four linked essays on the subject of pain: The Bid for Pain, The Manner in Which Pain Becomes Me, Pain Beak-Pecks a Figurine, and Extraterrestrial Painsake. Exploring the more grotesque branches of the Gurlesque aesthetic, in Natural History Rape Museum Pafunda ventriloquizes through the unstable identities of her characters to create creepy tableaux that resemble-despite their vivid, violent excesses-the world we know.

Natural History Rape Museum

"Danielle Pafunda abolishes the stereotype of prissy, dainty girls in her thrilling poetry collection The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. Set in a surrealistic underworld, takes on the collective voice of empowered female corpses and ironically uses quaint language and structure to describe the true nature of women. […] Pafunda’s collection leaves readers craving more of its 'rotten pages.' 'If you’re looking for something pretty,' don’t look here. —Verse, Brittany Capps • "We don’t often see choral speakers, but speaking in unison gives these 'girls' collective presence, forcing us to face gender violence. [T]he girls gain a certain power in this…raw girls who bypass maturity, who are as rank and offensive as possible. These unrefined girls are deeply unsettling." —The Plot, Heidi Czerwiec • Danielle Pafunda is the author of The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books, 2017), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books, 2008), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and the chapbooks Cram (Essay Press, 2015) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of this Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace, 2014). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry and have been anthologized in Beauty is a Verb: The Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting &amp; Child Rearing (Fence Books, 2007), Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Penguin, 2015).

The Dead Girls Speak In Unison

Pretty Young Thing documents an unnamed young woman’s life in a book of hours slit like an electric cord, splintered, and fused to the pavement,” in a voice that is by turns frank, demure, sweet, sultry, determined, passive, angry, and resigned. Constructed as a sequence of mostly untitled poems, the fractured narrative of this innovative debut traces the physical, historical, and emotional terrain of female sexuality in lyric monologues both interior and dramatic. With these darkly powerful poems, Danielle Pafunda flips the notion of feminine innocence on its back, showing it's not as pure as people imagine.

Pretty Young Thing: Poems

Soft Skull

Poetry. Danielle Pafunda's third collection IATROGENIC: THEIR TESTIMONIES is a glittering gloaming sci-fi pregnancy epic. It takes place in half-light and lullaby, blaze and shiver. The poems owe a debt to Margaret Atwood, Matthew Derby, Donna Haraway, Edgar Lee Masters, and Monique Wittig, among others, but this book is an animal unto itself. A collaborative of women quits our world for a compound of its own making. They conjure and impregnate cyborg surrogates. We hear from these women, their surrogates, and a small band of renegades. Lacunae abound, history rears, death and its vicious proxy loss stalk. All are perched, maggot visionaries and at the same time most regular. "Danielle Pafunda's IATROGENIC is that rare book for which we can never be ready. It is a fat valise of incendiary poems. Where has it come from? How should I know? Perhaps Lady Pafunda wrested this language from birds. In any case, she has infected me and recruited me with her 'thick sting of pleasure.' There is nothing extinct about her."—Rachel Zucker

Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies

Noemi Press

Poetry. THE DEAD GIRLS SPEAK IN UNISON is Danielle Pafunda's sixth and most explosive collection of poems.

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Coconut Books

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