Bloof Books Archives

80 pages/$15.00

Review by Anne Champion

Poets get to take great liberties when it comes to language: they play with sound and meaning. Good poets will relish the way their carefully chosen words will take on new connotations next to other words and images. There are only a few words that don’t slip and shift in a poem, and one of those words is “rape.”

Danielle Pafunda’s fifth poetry collection, Natural History Rape Museum, boldly interrogates this word, graphically turning it over for inspection with dirty fingers and bloodshot eyes. In using the word rape, the title casts a long shadow over the rest of the collection. Even cradled between words like natural, history, and museum, the word always finds its meaning with the speed and violence of a gunshot wound. Despite cultural confusion and political debates over the rape and policy, the word holds only one meaning for most women readers, and that meaning is bound up in fear, anger, disgust, and violence. In Pafunda’s blurbs, many readers likened her to Sylvia Plath, and I would have to agree. While Pafunda’s voice is undoubtedly new, fresh, and evocative, the feelings of rage and destruction that these explosive poems leave in their wake are as visceral as those from a Plath poem. Continue reading →

Bloof Books

86 pages/$15.00

Shanna Compton’s Brink is part one of a two part poetry collection: Brink and The Seam. Both embody the realm of speculative poetry with their focus on fantastic, science fiction themes. In an interview, Compton describes Brink as “before”and The Seam as “after.” Presumably, with the themes alluded to in Brink, we can infer that this means pre-apocalypse and post apocalypse poetry. In Brink, Compton flirts with disaster on every page, constantly teetering on the edge of complete chaos and devastation.

Compton, who has authored several full length poetry collections and chapbooks including For Girls & Others and Down Spooky, mixes the mundane alongside the fantastic in this collection. Mars and other planets are referenced in medias res of a couple’s arguments, shoplifting, and the common aches for adoration and perfection within the human condition. In this way, the poems suggest a futuristic landscape while also seeming so familiar that they hint towards the anxiety of a doomed future being much nearer than we would like to conceive. In ‘Panoramic View,’ Compton writes:

Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer.

It used to be the place we’d throw out

as impossible, utterly unreachable, so red

and foreign and sere. Not anymore….

It’s bluer than I thought, attained. Like most things

I wish we could take back.

Here is a prime example of how Compton can mingle the otherworldly alongside the common stings of this world. The inhuman and the human reflect upon each other through warped telescopes, revealing all sorts of surprises and similarities. Continue reading →

Bloof Books

[REVIEW] Natural History Rape Museum, by Danielle Pafunda

Brink by Shanna Compton (A Review by Anne Champion)