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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 horror of desire. Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other."

When Daphne Gottlieb first found herself the character in someone else’s story she was intrigued; over time, as she appeared in more and more stories, she started to wonder about the implications of what was real and what wasn’t. Did it matter that there were published stories of her having sex in bathrooms, vacant parking lots, on the balcony at a party in an old bordello? Did it matter whether or not they were true?

This question sparked the idea for Fucking Daphne, a collection that blurs the lines between reality and fiction and begs the question “who is the real Daphne?” A pill-popping wild child? A soft place to fall with a broken heart? A dreadlocked vixen?

Contributors include Hanne Blank, Stephen Elliot, Sarah Katherine Lewis, and Ariel Gore, who describe, watch, and engage with a character that is not Daphne Gottlieb; Daphne is a projection, a fantasy, a zeitgeist. We are all a multitude of people in bed. We are all Daphne.

Harnessing the playfulness of the hoax, the seductiveness of literature, and the edginess of the avant-garde, Fucking Daphne is unique in a culture hungry for sex, information, and most of all, understanding.

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 where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from room to room with her clipboard of forms, Sasha encounters the insane, the suicidal, and the brave—then returns to her office to look up all her friends' and enemies' medical records.

Taking its title from Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Gottlieb and DiMassa's first collaboration is both moving and darkly funny. Where comedy meets chemo, where mirth meets mortality, Jokes and the Unconscious explores the murky terrain of grief—a shadowland of memory, sexual escape, and morbid snickering.

Exploring the realities of public piety and private philandering, Homewrecker combines fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to present a multitude of perspectives on adultery and the emotional complexity that affairs entail. Acclaimed contemporary writers share space with fresh talent in its pages, each with a different take on adultery and its aftermath. In "The Other Man," Stephen Elliot remembers the dominatrix who two-timed him with a square. Lori Selke spins steamy erotica in "Sex and the Married Dyke," a story about how quickly queer marriage can degenerate into extramarital queer activity. Neal Pollack's "Confessions of a Dial-up Gigolo" recalls the early days of the Internet when anything seemed possible, even destroying the marriage of someone you've never met.

In poems... Gottlieb identifies and articulates the personal and social desires, fears and traumas 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. Through such iconic American figures such as Mary Rowlandson and Patricia 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.