Book Reviews Issue #31

Kissing Dead Girls

By Sarah Coffey
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

KISSING DEAD GIRLS

By Daphne Gottlieb
(Soft Skull Press, $14.95, 127 pages)

This ambitious collection of prose-poems splices together highbrow intellect with the gory sensibility of slasher films, a juxtaposition that poet and performance artist Daphne Gottlieb explored in her previous poetry collection, Final Girl. Revisiting the unsettling terrain of loss and longing, Gottlieb thematically links the poems with an assortment of lusty narrators who metaphorically make out with an all-star cast of resurrected corpses, including Karen Carpenter, Frida Kahlo, and Jonbenét Ramsey.
Gottlieb writes with unflinching nerve, pushing the limits of experimentation. The results are mixed — pop-culture odes like “love poem to aretha franklin” veer dangerously close to formulaic quips (“you make me feel like a natural / disaster”), while more complex collages of verse border on brilliance. In one poem, a warmed-up Marilyn Monroe speaks only in questions, interrogating her lover with outbursts like “What is the opposite of hopelessness?” and “Do these sheets make me look fat?” With frank compassion, Gottlieb breathes life into an icon whose famous death eclipsed her relatively short life. Hundreds of tiny deaths are splattered across the pages of Kissing Dead Girls — the physical decay of the body, the brief life of an orgasm, the metaphysical death of an idea pinned down on paper, and the death of countless girls reborn through art.

Gottlieb is a master of first-person point of view, and the most compelling character in the book is the ever-changing narrator. She’s constantly killed and resurrected — one moment she’s a heartsick lover pining for the lofty Amelia Earhart, and a few pages later she’s a bloodthirsty predator conquering the body of Lizzie Borden. In “letters to a dead reader,” Gottlieb sums up this narrative paradox: “The author, of course, is quite dead. But the words, they’re quivering right now, undulating like a dead girl, writhing like a dead boy. All of this. Right in your hands. Right now.”