Customer Reviews

Pretty Young Thing: Poems

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The photo on the cover (by Christa Parravani) shows Danielle Pafunda striding long-legged, in turmoil like the clouds above her head, with the brilliant fiction writer Jedediah Berry in tow like a plow. If I were Berry I would have lost about ten pounds before agreeing to be photographed being dragged unflatteringly across a rutted field. The extra weight just makes him look careless, and anyone who's read his writing knows that he's not.

There's a sense of breaking new ground all throughout the book, which has a few MFA wearyisms but for the most part is filled with excitements both splendid and new. Pafunda doesn't always title her poems, which has its own integrity, as though they came to her complete from far-off muses' cabaret. She quotes from Artaud, from Joni Mitchell, from Sylvester and Can Xue with equal respect and a deep sympathy for what each artist is doing.

Often the poems come to us without direct referent ("It wasn't porn. It was just cards," one begins) leaving the reader to supply the context out of his or her own head. Sometimes the personal pronoun "I" gets clipped, like a coupon, out of the poetic sentence; like Freud's repressed, however, Pafunda's "I" always returns, for it is pretty much a poetry of identity and psychic shock, detailing the outrageous things that come into her head or her body makes her do or think. "I dress in soiled pajamas./ My rash flares." 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. Those of us who first noticed Pafunda's work in Lyn Hejinian's edition of the BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2004 will be happy that a whole book is here. Our rash flares.

Pretty Young Thing is a series on maturing. Danielle Pafunda offers a Gurlesque perspective to show that love and adolescence are not the pretty pictures painted by society. Her language is heavy, like the burdens her speaker carries. The painful images of carnage, infection,and sickness allow Pafunda to paint a picture of the dirty innocence that her narrator possesses.

The title of the collection connects it with the Gurlesque movement in literature. It is irony to say that something so difficult could be pretty. In doing so, it makes a jab at how young women are viewed as objects which are expected to be dainty and attractive. The cover shows the weight a young woman bears when she has fallen in love with a man. These poems speak of how the image of the speaker is displayed and how the character feels. The speaker has a feeling she is being used but is not sure how to live any other way, and more than that, doesn't know if she even wants to.

Some of the poems are not titled. This gives an unconventional feel to the collection. She is showing that not everything in life has to have a title. Not all experiences in a young life can be explained or named. Overall, this work is a unique and powerful take on the struggle for young women to find their place in society and even challenge the place society has assigned to them.


-Valerie Romack

Without the title, without knowing anything about Danielle Pafunda, this collection of poetry would remind me of a lost young woman experiencing her life and all its hardships, peculiarities and nuances for the first and hundredth time. The poems in this collection seem to lead us on a tour through her life from its beginning all the way to where we find Danielle now (or now as the collection was written) working on her PhD.

One reminds me of a stillbirth ("Misconception"). The title is a mix of feelings about this poem. Misconception: an idea that is perceived erroneously. Mis-conception: A failed birth. Stillborn. It also smacks of miscarriage. The play on words in the title is fantastic in and of itself.

I see a little girl visualizing an abortion or perhaps a miscarriage or a stillbirth. She has done so in such an innocent way that I had to read this poem a couple of times to understand what she's driving at. The descriptions are varied and nuanced. The child that never is born was never wanted by Danielle. She harbors her hatred for the new child as a secret and likens it to a rock, an inanimate object with no value whatsoever. An invaluable secret that she kept to herself so that maybe it would never be. But it wasn't a secret. It had a name, it bled and Danielle had to deal with it in the best way she could. The new child put Danielle in a subordinate position with her mother. Jealousy, felt by many new brothers or sisters, cannot be helped and Danielle felt it. "My name was on a headstone for the living." Her life as she knew it was over, and she was already being marginalized by those she loved.

But the baby died. The next day she thinks about all the things she has licked and offers a list of strange items. I'm not sure what the significance of these are, but the idea of licking something, of beating something and winning a game or a war stands out to me here. The talcum powder on her breath indicates her defeat of her dead infant sibling. It also hints at her feelings of victory in the death of the new child. There is no remorse here at the end of this poem.

The quote immediately following this poem (II) seems to solidify my reading of it. "The dead little girl says, I am the one who guffaws in horror inside the lungs of the live one. Get me out of there at once." Her dead sister laughs at her from within her lungs, perhaps in the form of the talcum powder. The breathing in of the baby powder draws Danielle's dead baby sister inside of her where they are both tormented by each other. Again, the entire collection is written in an almost innocent racing fashion, but closer inspection reveals much darker meanings and feelings to Danielle Pafunda's writing.

All of the descriptions in the poems in this collection are written with a fresh face. By this I mean that no matter how heavy the content of the poem (i.e. sex, abortion, miscarriage, family violence, etc...) the acts depicted are done so in an almost innocent manner. The writing is disarming and fresh. Pafunda tackles a myriad of difficult topics in a way that the reader does not feel weighed down or burdened by them. Her depiction of her life in this way has a hint of sarcasm though. It lets the reader know that the manner in which she presents her poems is very deliberate. Pafunda takes the stigmas that society has placed on persons of her age, somewhere around 30 I think, (i.e. innocent, pretty, naive) and incorporates all of it in her writing. She has very purposefully articulated this collection so that she is mocking herself in its writing. She is not innocent or naive but she is still subjected to those stigmas by those around her. These ideas seem to drive her writing in this collection.

I highly recommend a careful reading of this text. Nothing is quite as easy or simple as it might seem at first read. I advise the reader to slow down and think about what is being said. Some of it might surprise you!