Kissing Dead Girls [Paperback]

Daphne Gottlieb (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (March 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933368675
• ISBN-13: 978-1933368672
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,955,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author and editor of nine books, most recently the poetry book 15 Ways to Stay Alive as well as co-editor (with Lisa Kester) of Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words.? She is the editor of F**king Daphne: Mostly True Stories and Fictions and Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, as well as the author of the poetry books Kissing Dead Girls, Final Girl, Why Things Burn and Pelt, and as the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious with artist Diane DiMassa.

Final Girl was the winner of the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry for 2003 from Publishing Triangle. Additionally, Final Girl was named one of the The Village Voice's Favorite Books of 2003, and received rave reviews from Publisher's Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Village Voice. Why Things Burn was the winner of a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award (Special Recognition -- Spoken Word) and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for 2001. Her work has been translated into Turkish and Greek, and has inspired theatrical adaptations and DJ-remixes.

Recent press has praised her work as "fierce," "unapologetic," "scorching" and "deliriously gutsy." She has been widely published in journals including The Utne Reader, Tikkun, nerve.com, mcsweeney's.net, Exquisite Corpse and Instant City. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Live Through This: The Art of Self-Destruction, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken Word Revolution, Don't Forget to Write!, Half Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn and Short Fuse: A Contemporary Anthology of Global Performance Poetry. She is also the cover girl on San Francisco Noir (Akashic Books, 2005).

Besides anchoring three national performance poetry tours, featuring with Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz and Lydia Lunch, 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.

Until 2006, she served as the poetry editor of the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly. She also was the poetry editor of Other Magazine and a co-organizer of ForWord Girls, the first spoken word festival for anyone who is, has been or will be a girl, which was held in September 2002.

Gottlieb teaches graduate-level creative writing, and has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at all levels around the country. She received her MFA from Mills College.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dark, complex & delicious, May 4, 2009

By 

C. O. Aptowicz (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kissing Dead Girls (Paperback)

Daphne Gottlieb made her name in spoken word by writing and performing edgy, non-conventional work. She doesn't shine her poetic flashlight into the dark corners of the human experience, as much as she snaps the flashlight off and sits within the darkness herself until she can communicate the experience honestly.

Her latest book of poetry, "Kissing Dead Girls," would seem, at first glance, a bit gimmicky. After all, for a poet whose work is already highly associated with darker themes and sexuality, writing a book where she has romantic liaisons with deceased historical figures might seem like a no brainer.

But Gottlieb takes what could have been a very easy book for her to write, and instead produces what might be her most challenging and complex collection to date. Her poems about "kissing dead girls" show these historical women as real women, interacting within the Gottlieb as they would a real lover. For instance, in the piece about Marilyn Monroe (my personal favorite), Monroe is shown in such a wonderful, sincere and multi-faceted way: bubbly yet manic, beautiful yet insecure, haunting yet haunted, and even alive yet dead.

The title series is just one themed series which runs through the book, which is so dense with wonderful material, it takes several sittings to reach the end -- and that's a compliment! I have to admit, I was shocked by some of the pieces, both in terms of her chosen subject matter and her raw approach. But doesn't poetry need more moments like that -- wake-up calls to the fact that not everything in poetry should be safe, or presented in such way that makes your feel comfortably distant. Sometimes we need a Gottlieb to shake us up a bit, show us the dark so that we can appreciate the light.