Manhater

Poetry. "Danielle Pafunda is a sick twist. I read her for seer and scar. She sees and scars, most especially my insides. MANHATER doesn't hate so much as it confounds. It mixes me up: finding-me-with its scathing, tight phrases, bit-off and spit-out with the kind of venom you don't manufacture because you're born-with. It finds-me-with its horrormother, a figure both ick and sympathet-ick, both grotesque and ingrown, mommydearest of nightmare and mirror. It finds-me-with its plates of illness—china and petri, 'shard and glisten'—and with its ex-lovers: weep boys and beardeds and dog ones. Always, Pafunda finds-me-with something. I'm always ashamed. And always, always I'm smiling."—Kirsten Kaschock"Danielle Pafunda is at it again, thank goodness: saying what almost no one else will say, as only she can say it. Read her for the reality check; come back for the rhetorical rocket fuel. These poems ask: Can you recognize yourself in Mommy? Can you recognize yourself in the mirror? MANHATER collects the language of the body, the body, the body. The world lurking in its pages 'expels symmetry,' 'surveys...the sunrise / barf,' invites the 'bitch seizure,' will 'shard and glisten' for you. Enter and 'wait for the tremble.'"—Evie Shockley"To read Danielle Pafunda's MANHATER is to occupy a world of exuberantly dreadful, vibrantly horrifying sentences about decay, death, 'penumbral scuzz,' and the parasites that live in the parasites that live in the basest bodies among us. In Pafunda's mantis-like narrator, I hear 'jolly worms' and 'sarcophagus parties.' I hear exhilaration in destruction, in 'gasping bodies of doom.' The speaker in these poems might destroy the love she touches, but in the process she excretes with a syntax that's dazzlingly scary: a direct delivery of humanimal emission; an infection of flesh and body; sentences that discharge what's magically repulsive in carcass, fungus, milk, blood, and goo. Here there is composition in decomposition, spasms of sparkle and rot."—Daniel Borzutzky