Along the Road Everyone Must Travel

Along the Road Everyone Must Travel was selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the 2023 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Set in the topsoil above the underworld, at the foot of empire, Pafunda’s tenth book of poems takes place during a spring super-bloom, a colony collapse, an end-time. It’s a lanky, muscular meditation on belonging--as both property and beloved. Pacing the road from desert to sea, unraveling gender from violence from capital, asking what happens when we finally refuse to dog eat dog our way through, this queer surrealist epic leaps from the Homeric hymns to post-punk lyrics, holding its tender friends, calling out its loves to play, slick with sex, illness, loss, and wonder.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of ten full-length books and two chapbooks, including Spite (The Operating System), Beshrew (Dusie Press), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), which has been translated into Spanish by the writer Cristina Rivera Garza as Las Chicas Muertas Hablan al Uní sono (Dharma Books). The Book of Scab, an autofictional lyric, won the Ricochet Editions Troubling the I prize. Pafunda’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, and Conjunctions, and she teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.