Kissing Dead Girls (REVIEW)

Preview of review forthcoming at Danforth Review

Kissing Dead Girls by Daphne Gottlieb is exquisite, globally-sourced, beyond the realm of the “everyday”, which for some reason, in addition to the word “weave” has become routine review words for poetry criticism in recent times. It’s quickly become my favourite poetry release of 2008, though I feel like a real creep reading it in public because of the title, which of course, is way creepier when I write about that in a review than simply well, not mentioning it.

Gottlieb teaches at the New College of California and is the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader and the forthcoming Fucking Daphne, as well as the author of Final Girl, Why Things Burn, and Pelt. At times Gottlieb is operating without a poetry manuscript manual, corrosively entering and occupying the literary spaces of other genres including drama, the novel / fiction and the essay. Her found poetry, crafted from special interest web curiosity, culls and gels in a sort of erasure style, using italics to different sources that include musings and mashings of existing work that compliments and challenges original form. Kissing Dead Girls is quite simply superbly crafted, chameleonic. Though it is quickly dressed and out the door before you remember their name, you can’t write it off as a pretty poetry fuck-a-thon.

With post-gender realism and none of the sentimental drivel driving points home no one cares about, the voice explodes and shatters with human special effects. Open it up anywhere and you’ll find a cerebral interrogation, hell bent on expressing all of life’s pitiful pitfalls. It’s a collection suffused with passion, aggression and linguistic finality: Gottlieb’s prowess is not excessive but a tool to reveal poem characters caught in the tantalizing web of a sexual dysfunction. In the throes of poetry, this work would be worth seeing performed live.

Using dialogue, confessions, interviews, erotica, Gottlieb’s sexual manifesto is intelligent, lyrical and giving, reminiscent of The Happy Birthday of Death, or Pussy King of the Pirates, Kissing Dead Girls moves in and out of categorical restraints, voice and form, and is entirely worth investigating. Not a safe release, not throwaway smut, but essential smut, reclassified as purging catharsis, as found in ‘The Real Deal’ where Gottlieb revisits Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” a monster rendition of agony, shame and reality:

“She is ready to be a good little girl, the best girl, she wants to be Daddy’s best girl. She doesn’t make it to work for two days. Her jaw is sore. She can’t sit down because her ass is welted and her cunt is raw and Daddy leaves a message on her phone. It’s Father’s Day. She didn’t call him.”

‘Glass Onion’, is a calm musing on the disposable culture of sex. Gottlieb’s poetry itself enters the difficult terrain of recreating physical empathy and has obviously toiled hard for a meaningful work that cannot be classified as everyday, the official word of 2007 poetry criticism worldwide. The perfect book for the confused pedestrian who thinks in text speak and grunts, with too much “everyday” weaving in and out of their truly miserable lives. (Nathaniel G. Moore, author of Let's Pretend We Never Met)