Danielle Pafunda
6 x 9, 80 pages
Trade paper original
ISBN: 978-0-9826587-5-8
$15
“It feels good,” says Danielle Pafunda, “to conduct the world’s violence on the page. It’s my response to violence without doing or incurring much violence. It’s how I navigate through it.”
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 corners 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.
Danielle Pafunda is the author of Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books 2008), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Beauty Is a Verb: The Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), and Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting & Child Rearing (Fence Books, 2007). She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.
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