Danielle Pafunda’s poems dissect the body and psyche, revealing equal parts sinew, organ, scientific experiment and theatrical play. At first read, I wasn’t sure if the poems in My Zorba were hilarious or devastating; now I think they map the overlap between the two. These epistolary poems are necessarily fractured and they travel at the rapid speed of thought. A huge source of pleasure is that while Pafunda grounds us in the familiar terrain of the body she destabilizes that ground with absurdity, irony and objects out of context. Like the famous character from Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1946 novel, Zorba the Greek, Pafunda’s Zorba is dominant, passionate, bordering on violent and ready to speak on any subject. This Zorba, whose gender is in constant flux, serves as a kind of life guide for Pafunda’s female speaker. Whether acting like a mean teenage sister, an incompetent doctor, scientist, lover or alter ego; Zorba stands by the speaker as both her witness and her compass.
            The poem “What Historicity,” which appears early in the collection shows that Zorba has been a fixture in the speaker’s life since childhood: “Or, Zorba, let me do what I want. That Zorba told me, / when I was a little girl, don’t stand like that. Don’t cock / (blasé!) your hip like that, don’t limp your wrist, your / tip, your chew. / / She said” (12). Pafunda takes a floodlight right to the secret places: “In the peek-a-closet, in the creature’s peek. Under the stairs….Where we hung the ovary of homestead” (12). One result of Zorba’s presence is that she/he becomes a reference point as intimate as home. Notably, in that final line, the word ovary is connected to home, since many poems in this book suggest gynecological examinations or fertility treatments. The body also refuses to stay inside itself, making it easy for an ovary to become an external anchor like a building; in Pafunda’s vividly-drawn world, an ovary is a center of social activity.
             In “A Quarter-Hour of Recess,” Zorba orchestrates a creepy and ambiguous event: “In the schoolyard, Zorba wanted to compare genies. / With another girl. A panty-waist. He called me Russian. / The Russians are coming. A broken strand of panties. / Wind” (15). This unsupervised scene of name-calling and nakedness raises complex questions of child sexuality, power and consent. “He took turns on me. We performed a dance known as / ‘under doggies,’ and when that was banned, we called it / ‘under over’” (15). Even for the reader who is unnerved by the suggestion of child sex-play, it’s impossible to ignore the power Pafunda attributes to language. Words allow children to escape from institutionalized rules and to rename what has been “banned.” The speaker carves out space in language for a desire that the world refused her, likewise, Pafunda builds new constructs out of spliced images, fractured syntax and linguistic mazes, making room for experiences that others might choose to silence.
            The body, for Pafunda, is a shape shifter similar to language in that it has an intricate grammar and an arbitrary set of exceptions that could take a lifetime to decode. “When I tried to cover the hair with pancake, Zorba / intercepted. She patted down the razor blade. The laugh. / Later, Zorba, her own blade in hand. Her brittle” (15). Zorba has a remedy for each of the body’s imperfections whether by covering up, cutting off or “remov[ing] each tiny blemish from my back with a palette knife” (58). And the speaker takes pride in how well she has inherited Zorba’s insistence on smoothness: “Zorba taught me well / how to prepare a gelatin slide. How to exacerbate a crevice” (58). Complicating the content of these lessons with pleasing sonic effects, Pafunda will reach most readers who can relate to the tones: physical striving, the desire to transcend the body’s limits, the competition of performance. “I am waiting for your teeth to lose their grip on the rope. / That spins. I examine each of your vivid feathers as they fall / to the sawdust” (58). Amidst echoes of Kathleen Fraser, we can hear and feel the carnival setting in which the body of a spot lit female performer is being reduced and scrutinized.
            As the book progresses the speaker grows stronger in the face of Zorba’s orations and eventually refuses to participate: “At the tractor pull, Zorba asked me to read their cards. /…She asked for a profit margin. / …I would not” (17). And later in the same poem the speaker gains agency in her body: “Behind the concrete ribcage, beneath the opaline bleacher, / I removed my zipper from its package. I buried my zipper” (18). In the solitude of her zipper’s private gravesite the speaker has momentarily escaped Zorba’s gaze. It’s interesting that Pafunda uses the language of the schoolyard which recalls the earlier poem in which panties and Russians were part of Zorba’s twisted “game.” Here the images of “bleacher” and “concrete” are spliced with internal bodily structures; it’s as if the playground is inside the body, its human-built architecture hitched to and inseparable from the organic scaffolding of the flesh.
            In “Rallying the Plank, the Porch Swing Leans In,” the setting (as viewed from a porch) starts acting like a sick body: “The honeysuckle weeps like a lesion….I see outlined clearly the rogue hair in Zorba’s narrow chin. / / She gestures with the coke bottle. To the bottle. She angles / the glass against my skirt. Scleroid” (20). Even in adulthood, this speaker is still within range of Zorba’s desire, a desire suggestive of scarring. The hair on Zorba’s chin is alarming given her earlier instructions on shaving. And there’s a new tone of wisdom about the body: “With Zorba’s fingers, I have seen the shape of the triangle. / The shape of the hole and the shape of the plaintiff. I have encountered the shape of a blade of grass, which slips just / between the two doors of the porch. Screen and otherwise” (20). Whether or not we choose to judge or define the exact terms of the speaker’s relationship to Zorba in this poem, we can’t deny that learning is taking place. I’m also reminded of a metaphor earlier in the book that refers to the body as a house: “She put pantyhose over her athletic shorts. And a skirt / over that. I did the same. A porcelain crematorium / over my house” (16).
            After watching the speaker in the role of the “subject” of Zorba’s tests for much of the book, in “Wallowing in a Science, the Cupboard Bares All,” we finally see a clear break in this pattern. The first stanza begins with Zorba’s strong familiar gaze: “She eyed the suture in my butter dish,” but in place of the fourth stanza, we have the stand-alone word, “Victorious” (33). Then the speaker steps into the role of scientist, and examines a specimen other than herself:

“In the pseudo-unmediatedness, unmitigatedness. In the simulacrum / of
predawn, I wore the camouflage of red terry cloth and performed
tracheotomies on the sugar ants, until each could breathe / through the
thorax, uninterrupted by guilt” (33).

Here we see Pafunda’s skillful and playful craft, in which humor, neurosis and performing micro-surgery in one’s bathrobe, seem utterly tender and serious under the lens of an insomniac’s logic. Fully absurd, this is still a moment of private revelation; an arrival; a shift in the speaker’s identity in relationship to the now absent (and presumably sleeping) Zorba. Has Zorba’s vigilance faded? Is she growing old and unable to keep up her antics? Is the speaker free or has she simply been well-trained to enact her own power and desires on others, like the ants? What is the meaning or the logic at work here, you might ask? Perhaps the only logic that matters is that of the body in the present moment, making its tiny discovery. Perhaps not. Pafunda leaves it up to us. But by the end of the book the myriad ambiguities of physical existence can no longer be denied; we have been stimulated and left to examine our own spliced internal versions of things. Like My Zorba’s speaker, we are somewhat disoriented but still moving toward the source of our sensations.