Bloof Books

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 →