Kissing Dead Girls is a kisstorical romangling that investigates myth, history, gender and states of being. Beginning with the province of legend, Kissing Dead Girls uses poetic inappropriacies to touch historical paragons and examine what touches us in them in vignettes casting the narrator as the lover of Josephine Baker, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank, Frida Kahlo, Jonbenet Ramsey, Sharon Tate and Karen Carpenter. The "real" world fuses with the mundane as a liver is received in the mail by an unexpecting recipient; a woman replaces the moon with her heart; and a man finds himself a woman too dead to love. Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-seen in an attempt to unpack the relationship between love and war; Walt Whitman makes a command performance in dismembered bits of forced formal verse; and "The Exorcist" and "The Devil in Miss Jones" are sutured together in an attempt to locate the true horror of desire. Fusing together pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the Other, even just one.

San Francisco-based Performance Poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (Soft Skull Press, 2005), as well as the author of Final Girl (Soft Skull Press, 2003), Why Things Burn (Soft Skull Press, 2001) and Pelt (Odd Girls Press, 1999). Final Girl was the winner of the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry for 2003 from Publishing Triangle. Additionally, Final Girl was named one of the The Village Voice's Favorite Books of 2003, and received rave reviews from Publisher's Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Village Voice. Why Things Burn was the winner of a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award (Special Recognition - Spoken Word) and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for 2001.
Recent press has praised her work as "fierce," "unapologetic," "scorching" and "deliriously gutsy." She has been widely published in journals including The Utne Reader, Tikkun, nerve.com, mcsweeney's.net, Exquisite Corpse and Instant City. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Don't Forget to Write! (826 Valencia Books, 2005), Red Light: Saints, Sinners and Sluts (Arsenal Pulp, 2005), With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp, 2005) and Short Fuse: A Contemporary Anthology of Global Performance Poetry (Ratapallax, 2003). She is also the cover girl on San Francisco Noir (Akashic Books, 2005).
Besides anchoring three national performance poetry tours, recently featuring with Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz and Lydia Lunch, Gottlieb has also appeared across the country with the Slam America bus tour and with notorious all-girl wordsters Sister Spit. She has performed at festivals coast-to-coast, including South by Southwest, Bumbershoot, and Ladyfest Bay Area.
Until 2006, she served as the poetry editor of the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly. She is the poetry editor of Other Magazine and was a co-organizer of ForWord Girls, the first spoken word festival for anyone who is, has been or will be a girl, which was held in September 2002.
Gottlieb currently teaches at New College of California, and has also performed and taught creative writing workshops around the country, from high schools and colleges to community centers. She received her MFA from Mills College.

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pilot light


I’ve been wrecked by Amelia Earhart. When she’s not around, I nuzzle the fuzz on the inside of her leather cap’s earflaps, finger the soft folds of her tan aviator’s jacket. When she nonchalantly breezes through the room, slings her jacket over her shoulder, matador-like, I thrill to the fact that my fingerprints, the tiniest morsels of my skin, travel with her.

She always knows exactly where she is. I only know by my proximity to her. To Amelia’s left. To her right. 5,000 miles away. Beyond my grasp. Right now, she’s doing something with a map and a compass at the table, sipping her coffee. Now she’s calculating something on its edge. Now she’s talking out loud, and I pretend that she’s talking to me when she mutters, but I know her sweet nothings are just for the sky, something big, something beautiful, something that makes her free and brave and strong. Something that makes her fly. I’m nothing she even sees, with skin barely the color of sand, eyes the color of dirt in the rain. I’m hardly even here.

When I dab plane fuel behind my ears, she sighs the sweetest sound, a dove’s coo, breeze through spring branches on a warm night. She swoons slightly, she stirs, she looks up at me. And she grabs her cap and jacket. The air is calling her. That’s what she wants. That’s where she’s going. I know how it feels to want like that, to be pulled, torn apart, incapable of doing anything but that thing that is calling to you. It’s how I feel about her.

It’s why I’ve painted myself the idyllic blue of the clearest sky, bought clothes that are the shiniest silver of the fanciest planes, dyed my hair the serene dark of midnight skies. And I’m still not close enough to what she wants. I’m still not good enough for her. I’m only good when I’m near her. She’s the only thing that makes me feel good.

When her I hear propeller stutter overhead, I run outside to watch her soar, feel the sudden cold of her plane’s shadow pass over and through me. When I reach my fist up to the sky, stretch my fingers up, it’s like I can almost touch her, even when my hand is empty. From that high up, I can almost believe she’s smiling down, waving, seeing me see her, loving the reflection, seeing herself soaring over me. She’s never more beautiful than when she’s completely gone.