Kirjahaku

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.

Sonnets written from the Shakespearian impulse from Sonnet 133, 'Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan!' A speculative noir mystery in the form of a palm-sized prayer book, in which the body is never found.

Danielle Pafunda's Spite reimagines Andr Breton's Nadja in conversation with his Communicating Vessels and My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed. Spite speaks through the melancholy bohemian dream girl. No longer gateway to the masculine artist's destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems consider what happens when we no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site. Nadja rolls her ex-lover on a gurney through a city on fire. She trawls construction sites, nurses' brows, and apple trees. We pick up the tin-can extension, wreck ourselves on the delirious island, consider the dishonest belief that every day must include / pain, and descend a massive swath of silk. Spite has no fear of ugly feelings, nor of wonder.Excerpts appear at: Diode PoetryTypo Magazine

Along the Road Everyone Must Travel was selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the 2023 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Set in the topsoil above the underworld, at the foot of empire, Pafunda's tenth book of poems takes place during a spring super-bloom, a colony collapse, an end-time. It's a lanky, muscular meditation on belonging--as both property and beloved. Pacing the road from desert to sea, unraveling gender from violence from capital, asking what happens when we finally refuse to dog eat dog our way through, this queer surrealist epic leaps from the Homeric hymns to post-punk lyrics, holding its tender friends, calling out its loves to play, slick with sex, illness, loss, and wonder.