Joyelle McSweeney on Danielle Pafunda's Self-Snaring Complications

We wanted more, we got! And often we are permitted to return to The Poetry Project Newsletter. A print object, it's generally full of great and timely reviews, but yes it remains a print object. Remember those?

Bloof Book News has come to the rescue for those of you non-subscribers, rendering a review published in PPNL #239, April/May 2014, of Danielle Pafunda's Natural History Rape Museum, by Joyelle McSweeney, into internet-reprint. "This new volume finds Pafunda full of trick moves and self-snaring complications, like a cutter-girl-Houdini or a lady knife thrower with her self roped to the target." McSweeney goes on to talk about the text boxes that hold Pafunda's lyrics:

The spectacularly inventive diction is burlesque and acrobatic, violent, yes, but the violence seems to indicate a kind of contraction in the muscle of the syntax, pushing the female pronouns along. This time the text box seems to be less the irritant that produces the poem than an out-of-body observation about the poem itself, a traumatic extra-space, self-consciousness that rises up and looks down.

Pafunda’s books continually and valiantly return to the scenes of gendered crimes, to the rape, the violation both historical and personal, the trauma of birth and of miscarriage and of objectification (the book begins, “When they called me vagina.”) which women are somehow expected to swallow down and survive. At the same time, each new book instants a furled and fishy banner under which an entirely nonvirgin, mutant nonqueen rides into battle. This queen must be doomed, as she must always take her lance (and lancet) back up, and never finish off fuckwad. But her ingenuity, her intensity, her brilliant, decaying armament is so radiant that each new volume by Pafunda seems to configure a new strategy of survival—

You can actually download PDFs of previous issues of The Poetry Project Newsletter here. And more info on Pafunda's book is at Bloof Books.