MY ZORBA
Danielle Pafunda

“In Pafunda’s fast-paced second collection, a ubiquitous imaginary friend/child named Zorba accompanies the book’s wacky speaker through a series of misadventures and transformations. Pafunda (Pretty Young Thing) accumulates mystifying lists (‘California bloodmoss, aphrodisiac, plenty’) and discomforting imagery (‘The honeysuckle weeps like a lesion’) in an extended meditation on fertility. Read as ‘a pelvic/ diatribe’ in which the female body is a ‘praise-shack’ holding the promise of the ‘ovary of homestead,’ these poems seek to locate the point at which the female body goes from human being to baby-making machine. Dehumanized, the female body in Pafunda’s poems is as unstable and conditional as the poems themselves: ‘Zorba might argue that, for the third time in a year, I had/ become hysterically pregnant. Indeed, might I.’ —Publishers Weekly

“Everything seems broken, haphazardly put back into place, trying to resemble what is was before the fracture, like a child gluing the lamp he broke back together. Scattered throughout the book are words and ideas glued together like ‘mommyanddady’ and ‘HanselandGretel.’ We recognize the form immediately, although it is a little off, but we find its purpose now changed and agitated—its reason stripped to the outline of an object. In places it becomes the outside world being ensnared by the whimsy of a broken set of blinds. In the end, there is a single reason to not put this book down, as well as it being a legitimate reason for picking it up in the first place: as Pafunda states in ‘Parsimonious Holiday,’ ‘It would be interesting to see what happened next.'” —John Findura, Verse