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April
2008
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Praise for My Zorba The outrageous love child of Berryman's squirrelly syntax and Dickinson's hermetic phrasal splicing. My Zorba envisions language as peek-a-boo theater. Part oracle, part exhibitionist, the speaker of these missives wields her fractured 'I' through the polysex costumage of gender. Pafunda's finger-in-the-eye pole dance sparkles with gothic fantasias created from the medical detritus of culturally annihilated bodies, dissected by the complicity of our own voyeuristic gaze. —Lara Glenum
—J.
M. LeCroix,
Praise
for There's
a sense of breaking new ground all throughout the book...with excitements
both splendid and new. Her sexual and social frankness will remind you
of the mid-period Anne Sexton, for like Sexton, Pafunda is rebelling against
a system which has a name for everything except the things most important
to a human, not to mention a woman. "Everything I owned reminded
me of a tampon." —Kevin Killian From first blush to last, these blunt, racy, sometimes alienating lines wipe that little-boy smirk off the book's title and assume a kind of intimacy that's not always comfortable, and frequently cutting. Pafunda's style is hard to describe. Full of starts and stops, missing referents and truncated clauses, period after period dropped in our path...the effect is thwarting and tantalizing, pushing us back even as we're drawn further in. —Aaron Welborn, Diagram Here, the poet’s commitment to a harsh, direct, spoken English is what propels the accrual and construction of a self. Count the monosyllables— it’s verbosity without varnish as the speaker shifts from desire to infuriation and all between. Hers is a voice that is decidedly a product of both our daily language and the cultural moment that gives rise to it. ...Pretty Young Thing is a book that offers more of itself with every reading. —Thomas Hummel, Octopus |
My
Zorba 
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). Other poems
and reviews have appeared in such publications as American Letters
& Commentary, Conjunctions, the Georgia Review, and
TriQuarterly. 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