Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-seen in an attempt to unpack the relationship between love and war; Walt Whitman makes a command performance in dismembered bits of forced formal verse; and "The Exorcist" and "The Devil in Miss Jones" are sutured together in an attempt to locate the horror of desire. Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other."

Kissing Dead Girls

Literature & Fiction

Gottlieb, Daphne

Dramas & Plays

Soft Skull

Heard the one about the dying father? In this savagely brilliant graphic novel by slam poet Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa, a 19-year-old woman named Sasha loses her father to cancer and takes a job in the hospital where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from room to room with her clipboard of forms, Sasha encounters the insane, the suicidal, and the brave -- then returns to her office to look up all her friends' and enemies' medical records. Taking its title from Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Gottlieb and DiMassa's first collaboration is both moving and darkly funny. Where comedy meets chemo, where mirth meets mortality, Jokes and the Unconscious explores the murky terrain of grief -- a shadowland of memory, sexual escape, and morbid snickering.

Jokes and the Unconscious: A Graphic Novel

Comics & Graphic Novels

Comic Strips

Cleis Press

For many performance poets, the simple act of writing down the words can kill a poem's spirit and energy. Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the same power of her live performances.

Why Things Burn: Poems

Final Girl the last girl left alive in the syntax of the "slasher" traces the history of the femme fatale in a sequence of poems and stories that display the verve and wit readers have come to expect from Gottlieb. In Final Girl Gottlieb is the survivor, the one who remains to tell the story: what was done to others, what was done to her, what might yet be done to her. Sexy and tart, dark and comic, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, Bride of Reanimator and The Babysitter Gottlieb identifies and articulates the desires, fears, traumas, both personal and social, out of which pop culture is madeand then she feeds pop culture back to itself. Though the slasher flick is central, Gottlieb finds resonances in sources as disparate as the early American captivity narrative, queer and feminist film theory, and her own mother’s death from breast cancer. Through such iconic American figures as Mary Rowlandson, Marilyn Monroe and Patty Hearst, Gottlieb delineates the ways in which we’re betrayed by our cultural fantasies about abduction, gender, literature, pleasure, and transgressionand, in so doing, synthesizes the death and life of the American female.

Final Girl

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Broken hearts, scattered dreams, postpunk politics, and postmodern cut-up collages spiral and flow in award-winning poet Daphne Gottlieb’s latest collection of startling new works that explore survival after personal or communal disasters and the renewal that follows. Whether she’s writing about unanticipated outcomes (After the Midway Ride Collapsed”), her mother’s passing (Somewhere, Over”), or absurd situations (Preoccupation”), Gottlieb’s deeply personal insights into the complex areas where life and contemporary culture collide offer readers a unique, thought-provoking perspective.
"I Have Always Confused Desire with Apocalypse"
We met over a small earthquake. Now, my knees
shake whenever you come around
and I’ve noticed your hand has a slight tremor.
Daphne Gottlieb is the award-winning author of seven books including the critically acclaimed poetry collection Final Girl (Soft Skull Press) and the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious (Cleis Press), illustrated by Diane DiMassa. Gottlieb has performed and taught creative writing workshops throughout the United States. She received her MFA from Mills College, and currently resides in San Francisco.

15 Ways to Stay Alive

Poetry

Manic D Press, Inc.

For more than 30 years, S corresponds with her first love, J. There is one story she does not tell: one about three men and an alley. She learns a new story: one in which she is unable to leave the two blocks surrounding her house, and unable to tell J exactly what happened to her. Isolated by trauma and depression, S finds a way back into her skin through the strangers she meets online for sex. The retellings of her adventures titillate J, who urges her on to more encounters. As in the 1001 Nights, this is a story made of stories: S’s own stories are interrupted and overwritten by similar, culturally reified stories. S’s life becomes scenes from everything from The Graduate and The Story of O to the words of Charles Manson and the Bible. What emerges in words, invocations and collage is a grasping at presence and absence in the age of the internet: to be read in real time is life, and the blank screen is death.

Saint 1001

Women's Fiction

MadHat Press

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