The fifth poetry collection by Danielle Pafunda, Natural History Rape Musuem centers around an unnamed speaker and her intimate/adversary, the fuckwad, in pieces interrupted (or violated) by their boxed-in titles. Further interrupting this narrative are a prose sequence and a menagerie of objects/animals/elements borne as totems by the speaker-a lump of coal, a stingray, a cord of wood, a wolf spider, an earthworm, the fly. The volume culminates in four linked essays on the subject of pain: The Bid for Pain, The Manner in Which Pain Becomes Me, Pain Beak-Pecks a Figurine, and Extraterrestrial Painsake. Exploring the more grotesque branches of the Gurlesque aesthetic, in Natural History Rape Museum Pafunda ventriloquizes through the unstable identities of her characters to create creepy tableaux that resemble-despite their vivid, violent excesses-the world we know.

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) and appeared widely in journals. 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.