Spite - by Danielle Pafunda (Paperback)

About the Book

SPITE reimagines André Breton's 'Nadja' in conversation with his 'Communicating Vessels' and 'My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed'. No longer gateway to the masculine artist's destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site.

Book Synopsis

Danielle Pafunda's Spite reimagines André Breton's Nadja in conversation with his Communicating Vessels and My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed. Spite speaks through the melancholy bohemian dream girl. No longer gateway to the masculine artist's destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems consider what happens when we no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site. Nadja rolls her ex-lover on a gurney through a city on fire. She trawls construction sites, nurses' brows, and apple trees. We pick up the tin-can extension, wreck ourselves on the delirious island, consider the dishonest belief that every day must include / pain, and descend a massive swath of silk. Spite has no fear of ugly feelings, nor of wonder.

Excerpts appear at:

Diode Poetry

Typo Magazine

Review Quotes

"'Were I not a citizen of the hole' the collection, midway through, asks, or states or builds in as a recurrence. Just as we settle on the meaning of spite, we don't see Danielle Pafunda's poems as full of spite, but rather working through the irritants that push, propel, and force the body, brain, and belief system into precarious holes. Spite, full of conviction and clarification, draws me to its second-sighted perceptions containing kindly habits, familial labor, consequences, and a deep cerebral build through brazen language. These poems bond me to her ferocity of how to examine the body and the brain in their sentience. Lines like 'that every day must include pain' coupled with later lines: 'Her name taking on a multidimensional haunt / when a dream is all about her.' It's all about the deepening world of what language begets and how Pafunda writes us into and out of these serious states of 'Hello in here.'"

--Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence (Wave Books)

"I left Pafunda's Spite feeling as if pain, wanting, holes, and spit had finally been adequately included in a manifesto of vulerableferocious love. I left Spite feeling as if someone had just perfectly described the exaggerations, disfigurations, and exultations of being a deeply loving human being in a more-or-less human body across a great length of human time. I left Spite feeling as if sprite and spirit had finally been given their late-capitalist forms, and so I will never actually leave Danielle Pafunda's brilliant roaring meticulous fireworks display--this book is the perfect new home for the world's ragecertainty."

--Sarah Vap, author of Winter (Noemi Press)