Final Girl

Final Girl ? the last girl left alive in the syntax of the slasher? traces the history of the femme fatale in a sequence of poems and stories that display the verve and wit readers have come to expect from Gottlieb. In Final Girl Gottlieb is the survivor the one who remains to tell the story: what was done to others what was done to her what might yet be done to her.Sexy and tart dark and comic low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture Slash Vamp Bride of Reanimator and The Babysitter Gottlieb identifies and articulates the desires fears traumas both personal and social out of which pop culture is made?and then she feeds pop culture back to itself.Though the slasher flick is central Gottlieb finds resonances in sources as disparate as the early American captivity narrative queer and feminist film theory and her own mother’s death from breast cancer. Through such iconic American figures as Mary Rowlandson Marilyn Monroe and Patty Hearst Gottlieb delineates the ways in which we’re betrayed by our cultural fantasies about abduction gender literature pleasure and transgression?and in so doing synthesizes the death and life of the American female.