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Interviews:
| Interviews with Daphne Gottlieb: | ||
| Hot Metal Bridge | MiPOesias | |
| toobeautiful.org | 3 A.M. Magazine | |
| Gay People's Chronicle | small.spiral.notebook | |
| LiP Magazine | ||
Reviews for Homewrecker:
| Detroit metro times small spiral notebook inside pulse the advocate weekly dig |
Reviews for Final Girl:
| 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 Daphne Gottlieb (Why Things Burn). Read the rest... — Publisher's Weekly (November 17, 2003) |
What goes around, comes around—and around and around, as an inexhaustible supply of slasher-movie retreads and pulp-fiction resurrections attests. A case can be made for the virtues of nostalgia and backhanded archiving, but is there anything left unexamined in these already vigorously chewed and digested genres, much less enlightening or entertaining? Read the rest... — The Village Voice (December 1, 2003) |
| Daphne Gottlieb’s Final Girl is a potent collection of poems focused around the theme of the ultimate pop culture survivor. The Final Girl is the last girl left standing at the end of slasher films, the one who is forced to turn around and fight the bad guy rather than lie down and die for him. Hers is one of many distinct female voices in Gottlieb’s work, and together they speak for women throughout history, from Cleopatra to Princess Diana, who has played the role of victim as well as survivor, sometimes simultaneously. Read the rest... — Summer Lopez, small.spiral.notebook |
Daphne Gottlieb writes in the dark with an Exacto knife. Whatever your fantasies, fears or vulnerabilities, Gottlieb will feed them to you off the points of a smashed bottle while she sips from the other end. This is a delicious autopsy of culture, genre, gender and so much more, which puts you right in the voyeur's seat. Eat it, eat boiling, oily popcorn and mortician's make-up until you wake up speechless and alone and ecstatic on the floor of the projection room. Sensational. — Diane DiMassa |
| To project the impact of the slam, the oral non-mediated cry, onto the page safe in the quiet book is a virtuoso feat. But that's only half of what Daphne Gottlieb does in Final Girl. These are accomplished poems of a profound psycho-sexual searching, a lucid analytic of our mad loves. Strong memorable poems: the B-movie "Other Woman," and the fine American heretic Anne Hutchinson's astonishing and wifely berating of God, these are two of the finest dramatic monologues I've laid ear on in years. Gottlieb has many voices, and knows how to stand in front of you, and behind you. And at her best, right inside you. — Robert Kelly |
In Final Girl, Daphne Gottlieb brainily, bloodily, erotically, amazingly makes connections between people that seem as disparate as 17th century heretic Anne Hutchinson and Patty Hearst, as Sojourner Truth and Kerouac. She twists the material of American captivity narratives, babysitter horror stories and slasher films and then some, into both a warning about and an embrace of just how really truly scary it is to be female at the start of what could may well be our final century. Not since Roky Ericson's band 'The Aliens' recast horror flicks as rock songs has such a perfect reappropriation of a great American pop art form taken place. — Rebecca Brown |
| Daphne's machete take on life leaves no one standing except us, for it's us she aims to elevate, the fucked over and the fucked up, and for that we thank her. — Lynn Breedlove |
The slasher film, while perhaps deservedly underrated as a genre, makes clear one thing about our society: we want certain things to survive. Daphne Gottlieb's Final Girl wickedly subverts this received idea as it plays out in the popular imagination. Her poems are courageous and startling. — Roger Corman |
Reviews for Why Things Burn:
| There are people who write poetry, and then there are poets, a breed apart and above and beyond mere versifiers. Daphne Gottlieb is a poet whose first collection, Pelt, only hinted at the extraordinary writer she was to become... Why Things Burn contains writings of unimaginable power and pain... Gottlieb uses language as a weapon, as a shield, as a means to communicate at levels far deeper than ordinary speech. Why Things Burn will tear your heart out, even as it fills your soul with wonder. — "Poets and Pests in Our Midst" by Deborah Peifer, The Bay Area Reporter (Aug. 2, 2001) |
...I have been searching for poetry, recently, to see me through a romantic break-up (it’s not quite as corny and seventeen as it sounds—he was married, for one thing, and I was living out Anne Sexton’s old hurts disguised as ennui [see “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman” in Love Poems]—I was hoping to find a Generation X version, in fact, of Anne Sexton). I wanted something young and angry and vulnerable and sexy all at once. Something fed-up and somehow still hopeful. I turned to Daphne Gottlieb’s Why Things Burn.. Read the rest... — Lisa Johnson, Women Writers (Summer 2003)
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| Daphne Gottlieb's poems clatter and smoke with the edgy rhythms of performance poetry... The results are incendiary... These poems are deliriously gutsy... — "Also New to the Shelves" by Carolyn Ogburn, Girlfriends magazine (Sept. 2001) |
Why do things burn? We can explain the phenomenon as a purely chemical reaction, a mixing and colliding of elements. I may not understand the language of science, but I do know that to make a fire, you need a spark. Local performance poet and former Sister Spit member Daphne Gottlieb is surely that, and Why Things Burn is a blazing inferno. From unnamed girls found dead on the Mission streets to a mother of a stillborn to little girls who learn from Barbie how to stay still when their fathers crawl into their beds at night, Gottlieb's heroines are fierce, and she tells their stories without flinching and without apology. In their voices and her own, she maps love, sex, passion and death on an electric grid that's vulnerable to blackouts but surges with a dangerous power. Though electricity can cause unexpected fires, Gottlieb knows well that the most consuming blazes are the ones we start ourselves; she admits in the title poem, 'I forget the difference/ between seduction/ and arson.' She ends with '1,000 tulips/ burned to death/ in Amsterdam... All night, you held my alibis/ so softly/ like taboos/ already broken.' There is no simple answer to why things burn, but Gottlieb shows what happens when they do — and perhaps that is more important. — Alissa Chadburn, San Francisco Bay Guardian (February 28, 2002) |
| The greatest contribution of the recent Poetry Slam 'movement' is living proof that words, if used properly, will become incendiary devices.... Daphne Gottlieb['s] new book of earth-scorching poetry covers everything from queer politics to Jewish relatives. — The Detroit Metro Times (July 18-24, 2001) |
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| Why Things Burn is many things... [but] it is not merely pretty poetry filled with beautiful words and high-minded ideas. Instead, it is full of scorching poems from the perspective of people who find themselves at a moment of resistance, refusing to be silenced, marginalized, alienated or oppressed any longer. — "Scorched Earth" by Kim McNabb, Chicago Free Press (July 18, 2001) |
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| Words are only the vapor peeling off the ore being forged out of life's circumstance. Gottlieb's words not only show her experiences, triumphs, loves, and anger but shin a light into our own. With language that is often convoluted, Gottlieb has transformed it into a reflective and irreverent ballad to self and societal reflection. Let the words burn into your soul. — "Things Burn to Keep Us Warm" by Hilary Jirka, Friction Magazine (Jan. 7, 2002) |
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Reviews for Pelt:
| Tender love, miserable love, animal love, and look-somewhere-else love are among the themes that crop up in Gottlieb's first poetry collection. Well known on the spoken word circuit, her strong voice rings clear in every piece, as each is infused with a strong narrative quality and concrete, memorable characters. Gottlieb has a wickedly smart sense of humor, edged with the pain of human fallibility... Clever, fun and deep all at once. — Jennifer Joseph, San Francisco Bay Guardian |
Pelt is... [a] call to freedom, born... from anger and also from a raw sexual energy that pulses through many of the poems. 'Though frequently mistaken for a successful performance poet,' says the book jacket, 'Daphne Gottlieb is actually a novelist for people with extremely short attention spans.'... San Francisco is home to both Gottlieb and the booming performance poetry scene in which she is a star. While much of the 'slam' performance poetry that has become popular in recent years doesn't hold up on the page, hers does..." — Minal Hajratwala, San Jose Mercury News |
 ottlieb's poetry is both fierce and subtle (from tales of fucking a swan to what being a prom queen gets you) with a sarcastic laugh rising from the pages. This book, whether to remind one of oneself or for a lazy read, should be ready by any woman who calls herself the "f" word [feminist].— "Verses of Feminism Versus the Patriarchy", Off Our Backs |
[Gottlieb's] poems have the complexity and depth of character that you expect from a good novel. I especially enjoy her ability to use everyday situations to create extraordinary verse. "Lost my Job and There's Cat Hair Everywhere" is the poem you MUST read in the bookstore, because then you'll want to own the collection." — Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter |
 his is] a solid little book. ...[I]nside, you get more than you bargained for. ...Best of all, it's a sensual experience, reading this book. ...The title poem...interweaves a narrative about the speaker's girlfriend with sexual dialog and instructions for flaying a rabbit. This book is not about making the reader comfortable. Most of the poems in the book will bite back. That's not even getting beneath the surface, which this book begs — rather, instructs — you to do.— Tarin Towers, author of "Sorry, We're Close" [Manic D Press], San Francisco Poet |
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