My Zorba
Danielle Pafunda

April 2008
Trade Paper Original
ISBN: 978-0-6151-9593-3
80 pp. | $15.00

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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). 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 daniellepafunda.blogspot.com for more information.

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

Lies, all lies.

—J. M. LeCroix,
friend of the family

Praise for
Pretty Young Thing

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."

At other times a seemly asceticism shines through the verse, and even a world- weariness slightly risible coming from a woman of 28; one wonders, how she will feel at 38? There's a quiet, devotional quality in Pafunda's best pieces, and a willingness to take in experience and to render it anew through the schematic of the poem, the "empirical wild goose chase," as she says in another connection.

—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