Pony Castle
Sofia Banzhaf
48 pages
Perfect-bound
First edition, second printing
Cover art: Flora Hammond
ISBN 9780993946448
Fall 2015
We drown a dozen oysters in Kir Royales and sweet Chardonnay and I can tell by the rose colour of Kurt’s cheeks that he is about to say something mean. It’s not his fault. It’s because we’ve been drinking since 3 pm. It’s because we do that - start drinking at 3 pm. I don’t tell him that I’m about to order another round of drinks.
Darkness is snaking its way through the characters in Pony Castle. Bad things are happening to good people. Winner of the inaugural Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (2015), Sofia Banzhaf’s debut novella is enthralling, like staring into the dark and seeing a prism.
Praise
“[Banzhaf] writes like heaven, and it’s a drug I badly want. Wolf down Pony Castle, then eat every last sweet, singing crumb.”
– Lynn Crosbie, poet and novelist
“Sofia Banzhaf creates a captivating world where nothing is free and anything can happen.”
– Chelsea Hodson, author of Pity the Animal
“Pony Castle reads like a line of crushed pill up the nose: a quick breath in and then the rush. Banzhaf’s writing is a straight chute to the most depraved of human behaviors, but within this brutal world, she finds grace and humanity.”
– Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star
Press
Entropy – “There is a kind of twinning in Pony Castle that digs under your nails, that speaks directly to the real versus unreal—the waking versus dreaming—hallucination of life.”
Broken Pencil – “Never quite poetry, and yet always dancing along those lines.”
Montreal Review of Books – “Banzhaf grants us access to the internal narrative of mundane actions. Then her language turns them into poetry.”
Sabotage Reviews – “Sofia Banzhaf’s Pony Castle is a work of beautiful entropy that centres on a dark metamorphosis.”
Interviews
The Cardiff Review – Interview with Sofia Banzhaf
rob mcclennan – 12 or 20 Questions with Sofia Banzhaf
Open Book – The Proust Questionnaire
