Fiction, Poetry, General & Miscellaneous Poetry

Final Girl

Name: Final Girl
Author: Daphne Gottlieb
ISBN: 9781887128971

by Daphne Gottlieb

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Overview

The one who remains to tell the story — the "final girl" — is the last girl left alive in this bracing cycle of poems that draw on slasher movies, captivity fantasies, queer theory, and death from breast cancer. Sexy and tart, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, and Bride of Reanimator articulate the dark desires, fears, and traumas out of which pop culture is made. Author Daphne Gottlieb is the winner of the 2002 Firecracker Award and a 2002 Lambda Finalist.

Synopsis

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.

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Editorials

The Village Voice

. Evoking such disparate characters as colonial American exile Anne Hutchinson and celluloid über-stalker Freddy Krueger, Gottlieb underscores the threat inherent in female representation. It's a heart-wrenching reckoning with carnality.

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. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Gottlieb's performance poems delve into the specifics of culturally sanctioned violence against women: pornography and fetish, gender stereotypes, the sex trade, homophobia, and a repeating nightmare of the "final girl," the last victim in the archetypal slasher movie. Her content is meant to be shocking, and it sometimes is; nevertheless, there are relatively few surprises here. When the narrator of "the babysitter" rifles through mommy's closet, trying on her clothes (meanwhile, "your baby's hands/ fumble for my nipples"), the reader knows what's coming next on the ride home with daddy. One poem that does surprise-"my mother gets dressed"-also succeeds in moving beyond posturing to a sad interior vision. Gottlieb is capable of snappy wit ("i knew it was over/ when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring"), and she writes convincingly of low-life dives, lap dancers, ambiguous sexuality, and sex crimes. Her poems are made to be performed but suffer on the page, resorting to gimmicks of text formatting and the lower-case i in place of a charged line. Finally, the enterprise grows tedious, like a long evening with an alcoholic bar mate. But it is what it is.-Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.