Daphne Gottlieb

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.

Between 1989 and 1990, Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute, shot, killed, and robbed seven men in remote Florida locations. Arrested in 1991, Wuornos insisted she had acted in self-defense, but the jury had little sympathy. Condemned to death on six separate counts, she was executed by lethal injection in 2002. An abused runaway who turned to prostitution to survive, Wuornos has become iconic of vengeful women who lash out at the nearest target. She has also become a touchstone for women's, prostitutes', and prisoners' rights advocates. Her story has inspired myriad books and articles, as well as the 2003 movie Monster, for which Charlize Theron won an Academy Award. But until now, Wuornos's uncensored voice has never been heard. Dear Dawn is Wuornos's autobiography culled from her ten-year death row correspondence with beloved childhood friend Dawn Botkins. Authorized for publication by Wuornos and edited under the guidance of Botkins, the letters not only offer Wuornos's riveting reflections on the murders, legal battles, and media coverage, but go further, revealing her fears and obsessions, her rich humor and empathy, and her gradual disintegration as her execution approached. A candid life story told to a trusted friend, Dear Dawn is a compelling narrative, unwaveringly true to its source.

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.

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.