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"A 'Final Girl' is the character in the slasher flicks who outlasts all the others: the girl who, upon being chased by an ax-wielding maniac, finally turns around and fights him off. In her new collection of poetry, San Francisco's Daphne Gottlieb is equally courageous in her quest to explore the performative nature of being female.
From baby to baby sitter to bartender; from Barbie to mother to whore, Gottlieb delves into women's roles and role reversals, stretching feminist boundaries with her limitless point of view. Drawing from an array of texts, ranging from Emerson's essays to newspaper accounts of the murder of Eddie 'Gwen' Araujo, she writes poems that are at times gritty, sexual, violent and sad, evoking in the process a numbr of women such as Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich.
What separates Gottlieb from that crew of writers is that the protagonists of her poems are more often heroes than victims, hunters rather than prey, like the girl in the poem 'Manifest Destiny': 'I did not run away from anything./Nobody touched me wrong./Nobody hurt me first/I was not a runaway girl./I am a pirate./I am running to. Adventure.
Such a stance is a little bit adolescent in both its youthfulness and ardor, but then, so is much of the best poetry. One hopes that Gottlieb's thoughtful poems about what it means to be female and thus subject to the male gaze are welcomed by new readers of any gender."—San Francisco Chronicle |
San Francisco poet Daphne Gottlieb shouldn't require much of an introduction -- that is, if her new collection of poems, Final Girl has anything to say about it. One of the strongest volumes of political poetry to be published in years, Gottlieb's work speaks to the present historical moment in a beautifully eloquent, dramatic, and everyday kind of way. Simultaneously hard-hitting, witty, and deeply moving, Final Girl is one of those books of poetry that ranks as simply necessary.
—Joel Schalit, Punk Planet |
| [S]imply devastating. Grade: A —Girlfriends |
| The slasher film, while perhaps deservedly underrated as a genre, makes clear one thing about our society: we want certain things to survive. Daphne Gottlieb's Final Girl wickedly subverts this received idea as it plays out in the popular imagination. Her poems are courageous and startling. —Roger Corman, Film Producer | |
Final Girl
Daphne Gottlieb
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| Paper | 6"x9" | 120 pgs. | ISBN: 1-887128-97-2 | List: $12.00 | 09/1/2003 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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Featuring:
About the book: Final Girl is 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 made and 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 transgression, and, in so doing, synthesizes the death and life of the American female.
About the author: San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She has been widely published in journals and anthologies including nerve.com, Exquisite Corpse and the forthcoming Short Fuse: A Contemporary Anthology of Global Performance Poetry.
Besides anchoring two national performance poetry tours, Gottlieb has also appeared across the country with the Slam America bus tour and with notorious all-girl wordsters Sister Spit. She has performed at festivals coast-to-coast, including South by Southwest, Bumbershoot, and Ladyfest Bay Area.
She is the poetry editor of the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly, as well as Other Magazine and is a co-organizer of the all-girl spoken word festival debuting in September 2002, ForWord Girls.
Gottlieb has also performed and taught creative writing workshops around the country, from high schools and colleges to community centers. She received her MFA from Mills College.
Links: Visit Daphne Gottlieb's official website (tour updates and more!), LiveJournal, and Why Things Burn tour blog archive from summer 2001! |
