In Pafunda's fast-paced second collection, a ubiquitous imaginary friend/child named Zorba accompanies the book's wacky speaker through a series of misadventures and transformations. Pafunda (Pretty Young Thing
) accumulates mystifying lists (“California bloodmoss, aphrodisiac, plenty”) and discomforting imagery (“The honeysuckle weeps like a lesion”) in an extended meditation on fertility. Read as “a pelvic/ diatribe” in which the female body is a “praise-shack” holding the promise of the “ovary of homestead,” these poems seek to locate the point at which the female body goes from human being to baby-making machine. Dehumanized, the female body in Pafunda's poems is as unstable and conditional as the poems themselves: “Zorba might argue that, for the third time in a year, I had/ become hysterically pregnant. Indeed, might I.” (Apr.)
