“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
Heard the one about the dying father? In this savagely brilliant graphic novel by slam poet Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa, a 19-year-old woman named Sasha loses her father to cancer and takes a job in the hospital w
Gertrude Stein's work is co-opted and re-imagined in an attempt to unravel 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 su
For many performance poets, the simple act of writing down the words can kill a poem's spirit and energy. Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the sa
The one who remains to tell the story - the "final girl" - is the last girl left alive in this bracing cycle of poems that draw on slasher movies, captivity fantasies, queer theory, and death from breast cancer. Sexy and tart, low-down and high-hearted po
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
