Kirjahaku

WHY THINGS BURN is about as hard-hitting a book of poetry as you'll experience this year. In her own inimitable style, Daphne Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbianism, rape, modern urban living, and the author's Jewish heritage, with a sometimes kooky but always sophisticated view of life. Honed to perfection in her 'slam' spoken word performances, these 50 poems are by turns witty, shocking, warm and fierce. The book also includes photos of the author on stage.

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.

When memory is a search-and-rescue mission, the struggle through to morning is a struggle through mourningIn this poetic exploration of love and loss amplified by personal and sociopolitical passings, award-winning author Daphne Gottlieb declares an indictment of systems, from systems created to leave people dying in the streets ("the bullet teaches us how to dance") to the systematic erosion of memory due to dementia ("yahrzeit"). In the absence of any indoctrination around ritualizing death, Gottlieb was drawn to memorialize her experiences of the past through poems, including "my dog teaches me things," about the final lessons learned from her best friend, a chihuahua. What shines through in every poem is the exceptional moments that create love, how we survive the heartbreak of profound loss, and what we get to keep and carry with us always.