Kissing Dead Girls

by Daphne Gottlieb

Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-imagined in an attempt to unravel 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."

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Lesbian

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Daphne Gottlieb is a San Francisco-based Performance Poet.

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

She has taught at New College of California, and 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.

Photo by Marlo Gayle

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly, nothing I say can fully put into words what this collection is like. Many poems went over my head (in the best way), but the language is delicious, and many of the poems did hit me square in the chest. There are some ballsy poems in this collection (pun intended), and while there are maybe a few instances where I thought perhaps things went too far, overall I greatly appreciated Gottlieb's willingness to push the envelope--to rip it to pieces, really. This is a daring collection, and I'm excited to eventually reread it with a pen in hand.

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

San Francisco-based performance poet Daphne Gottlieb is one of the most innovative voices in American poetry today, having carved out a space for herself out on the distant intersection of avant-garde verse, feminist theory, and popular culture. Her latest volume, Kissing Dead Girls, is another gleeful, high-speed smear of mordant humor, historical mash-up, and feral exploration of bodies, hearts, fluids, emotions, and scars. If in total the book is less startling and focused than Final Girl, her award-winning 2003 collection, it is because here Gottlieb is expanding her themes and experimenting with a broader set of poetic forms.

The poems in Kissing Dead Girls can be divided into two basic categories, the first being blunt chunks of prose poetry that often hang on a surrealist turn—a woman who thinks her clothes have memories (“carry-on”), a woman who, bored, replaces the moon in the night sky with her heart (“waxing”). These poems achieve varying levels of emotional impact; the intellectual reversal sometimes feels gimmicky rather than radically epiphanic, and one can’t help but feel that they benefit from Gottlieb’s renowned performance delivery, having at times the curiously lifeless rhythm that slam poetry can effect on the page.

The true brilliance of Kissing Dead Girls, and the source of its power, lies in the second category of poems, where Gottlieb’s penchant for engineering shocking juxtapositions comes into its own. With these poems she advances structures that are often either conflationary (alternating found voices, as in the scathing abortion poem “roe parasites”) or syncretic (combining two or more found narratives side-by-side, as in “our lady of the other,” which balances text from Julie Kristeva and Harriet Beecher Stowe). The effect is brilliant, troubling, and often funny: in forcing drastically different narratives together, Gottlieb has created a genre-bending synthesis all her own. Her sources—the appropriated voices and re-contextualized quotations—are the engine of the poetry, because she takes from a grab bag of cultural detritus high (Whitman, Stein, Orwell, Shaw) and low (pornography, tabloid headlines, The Exorcist, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenet Ramsay, crime shows) and swirls them around in a raucous vortex.

No one does this kind of verbal collage as inventively as Gottlieb. In fact, with the possible exception of Olena Kalytiak Davis, another poet of violent conjunction, no one I can think of does it at all, which marks Gottlieb’s achievement as a unique advancement. As recently as 2003 the critic Elisabeth A. Frost, in her book The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, could decry “the predominant models of identity politics on one hand and ‘feminine writing’ on the other—the two theoretical models that have dominated discussions of feminist poetics in the United States,” noting that the crippling “emphasis on personal voice—and the relatively transparent language that often accompanies it—supports an unspoken assumption that linguistic experimentation has little relevance to feminist writing.” Daphne Gottlieb’s revenants, “freshly dead and ready for love,” may have highly personal voices, but their language is hardly transparent, and all the more jolting and urgent for it. Gottlieb wills herself to be the lover of all these dead women, famous and obscure, and the force of her desire is both unnerving and invigorating. -- Zoland Poetry Review website, Winter 2008.

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first saw her read on a trip to San Francisco...I had no clue who she was, but by her style, could kind of guess what she was about. And when she started reading, she was so strong, so powerful; a force to be reckoned with. Her poems moved far beyond what I expected, and moved me more than I can explain. I worried that it wouldn't translate to paper, that since I am not a poet myself, the book wouldn't contain that same spark that covered my whole body in chills when she read. I was wrong.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly gorgeous, provocative, enticing book of poems. Gottlieb is incredible - bought this book after meeting her at Bluestockings in NYC. A contemporary Sylvia Plath in her depth, insight, and mastery of words.

[Couch Gremlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully disturbing poetry. Uniquely writin

[Gabriel Valentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daphne Gottlieb is extraordinarily creative with form. I am also always impressed with how she creates poetry out of the words of others, mashing together crime confessionals, excorcist dialogue, CPR manuals, etc. I would most compare her work to an experimental mixtape, samples and beats and rhythms and loops.

Is the imagery and language the most standout? .... Not in this one, but it's serviceable and overall I enjoyed it. A little too relatable as a used up queer slut. I wish there was another layer of something between the message and the subject and the language used to portray that. Another degree of abstraction or obstruction. But again, overall it did its job and I liked it.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled to get through this book, coming back to it multiple times over a period of years trying to find the right headspace to read these poems. I finally made it through, but this book is dense: dense with content, dense with ideas, dense with references, and the mix of poetry and prose means there are simply a lot of words on each page. I found it all a bit overwhelming and confusing and I zoned out pretty easily throughout this book. It’s the kind of work I’d recommend as a women’s studies textbook, and not to the average lover of poetry or queer lit.

[kiwi · Rating 4 out of 5]

gottlieb creates a universe that's so uniquely new. drawing on literature and its characters, on history and people through all time, she works some real magic when kissing dead girls. she experiments so much! i love it! using interviews and dialogue snippets and melting them into something different and new and Good and most of it is raw and ugly, even gory, but there's still a softness, and, despite it all, some kind of hope. some kind of fuckin' hope.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a challenging read, but in a good way. Not often do you find poems that really evoke physical sensations. My stomach hurt with discomfort and anger and sadness at different points throughout. The poem “the whole world is singing” broke me; I’ll never forget it. Very queer, very dark, very intense, very explorative. I doubt I’ll ever find a book quite like it.

[Andrea Janov · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really admire Gottlieb, and her creativity, her unique way to turn history and the patriarchy in on itself, blow it up, and take control. This was no different.

[nick]

Hard to rate. Consistent and interesting themes but kinda all over in quality 🎸

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's not really short stories. it's more like short pieces and poems intermixed with unclassifiable stuff. the entire thing is like walking into an art gallery. a lot of the pieces are based off something already in the world, an interview, a book, a painting. like any art gallery exhibit, there's stuff i love, stuff that's ok or not very good, and stuff i just plain don't get.

[Pamster · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked Final Girl. I think she's awesome, and maybe I just need to read poetry much differently and more slowly than I do. Also if it was called experimental fiction, would I be way more into it and willing to take the time to read and re-read? Probably. I'm a dick like that.

[Julie N · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to say it, but I really just didn't get it. I think I really enjoyed maybe one of the poems in the book, but the rest just weren't for me. I either had no idea what the author was saying or I was repulsed by it.

[Brandy Shark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved it. The poems were all fresh and provocative, so beautifully written. Vivid prose and verse. Several of the poems touched me quite profoundly. I cannot wait to read more of Gottlieb's work.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

For some reason, this collection did not have the same impact as Gottlieb's others I that have read recently. I walked away feeling quite disappointed by it.

[Elizabeth Kerns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is a heartbreaking.

[Gort · Rating 5 out of 5]

Et repellat sed. Architecto ea id consectetur. Non nihil est enim nulla cupiditate iste molestiae. Quaerat tempora iste animi vel ipsa minus.