Spite

by Danielle Pafunda

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

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, ebook

First published March 4, 2020

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spite is a refreshing, or no, decomposing, sprawling collection of poems and words that climb the page. Spite as contempt as ill will as curse? A (w)reckoning with (from the after-interview): "modernism's grooms, most especially André Breton", "the bad dynamic between hetero lovers", "the notion that masculine genius posited itself not only on feminine corpses in art and literature, but reinforced white supremacy and patriarchy by projecting a theatrically amplified whiteness, impossible standards of beauty, and biologically counterintuitive impermeability into those corpses."

It is my favorite type of writing, urgent like a manifesto, not content to sit on the page but leak through, push through, seethe through. Discontented. It casts a spell. It wants more.