Final Girl

Product Description

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 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.

From Publishers Weekly

Hollywood horror, postpunk feminism, spoken-word energy, true-crime reportage, vampire lesbians and modernist cut-up techniques collide and explode in this exciting third effort from Bay Area performance poet Gottlieb (Why Things Burn). The “final girl” in horror movies is the last one alive, who confronts the killer; here, the series of poems called “final girl” (numbered I through X) ties together a collection of fiery short works as canny as they are sophisticated and as sophisticated as they are angry. Gottlieb sometimes offers short-lined monologues that cry out for performance: “in a name” warns “woe for the man/ who can’t tell/ a kiss from a hiss.” Yet she also shines in cut-up, collage and multivocal works, assembling them from newspaper accounts of hate crimes, from interviews, from letters and diaries; these latter works recall the technique and the attitude that fans love in the late Kathy Acker. The prose poem “Liability” comments strikingly on transgender issues: a memorable epigram (unprintable here) tells “the frightening truth about desire,” while longer poems offer “the predawn mornings/ of lonely postcosmopolitan cities,” where Generation Y resists sexual violence and tries to discover what its choices are. “I abducted myself at gunpoint,” Gottlieb explains in another daring prose poem-“I am the X that marks my spot.” “See me as part/ of a resistance/ movement,” she asks elsewhere; and with her political appeal, her technical sophistication, her frequent touring (which includes prestigious rock festivals) and her youth following, a wide range of readers should line up to do just that.
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Review

“Gottlieb has a wickedly smart sense of humor, edged with the pain human fallibility. . . . Clever, fun, and deep all at once.”

About the Author

Daphne Gottlieb is the award-winning author of ten books including her recent collection of short stories,
Pretty Much Dead. Previous works include
Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, a collection of letters from Death Row by the “first female serial killer” to her childhood best friend. She is also the author of five books of poetry, editor of two anthologies, and, with artist Diane DiMassa, the co-creator of the graphic novel
Jokes and the Unconscious. She has relentlessly toured coast to coast, headlining solo tours as well as appearing with Hal Sirowitz, Lydia Lunch, and Maggie Estep. She has appeared at SXSW, Bumbershoot, and LadyFest Bay Area, and her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in more than 50 anthologies.

Daphne is the winner of the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant-Garde, the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, the Firecracker Alter