Deborah Landau

"A thrilling meditation on the passages of a woman's life."--O, The Oprah Magazine "Landau's killer wit evokes Dorothy Parker crossed with Sylvia Plath--leaping spark after spark, growing to deadly dark fire.The Uses of the Body is her best book, its acerbic tone interspersed with lines of grave and startling beauty.” --Los Angeles Times "Like Richard Linklater'sBoyhood,but for girls (and women): Deborah Landau's vividly relatable third collection,The Uses of the Body, reminds us that coming of age lasts well beyond adolescence.” --Vogue * "As freshly immediate as ever, award-winning poet Landau reveals that 'the uses of the body are manifold,’ moving in four sections with a roughly chronological feel from wedding parties to flabby bodies around the pool to the realization 'But we already did everything’--all with an underlying sense of urgency: 'Life please explain.’ As Landau explores her physical self and her sexuality, she’s tart, witty, fluid, direct, and brutally honest, and her work can be appreciated by any reader.”--Library Journal,starred review "Deborah Landau . . . is both confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Her taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions meditate upon yearning and selfhood."--Booklist Deborah Landau'sUses of the Body presents the very specific challenges of womanhood. Her poems address what it means to be alive--right now--in a female body. She fills her poetry with compelling nouns: wine glasses, bridal gowns, and "books and teacups and ghosts." Andwhat ghosts: underneath evocative images and poetic play, there's a moving, yearning mysticism. From "Mr and Mrs End of Suffering": The uses of the body are wake up. The uses of the body, illusion. The uses of the body. Rinse repeat. To make another body. September. Draw the blanket up. Lace your shoes. The major and minor passions. Sunlight. Hair. The basic pleasures. Tomatoes, Keats, meeting a smart man for a drink. The uses of the body. It is only a small house. It gets older. Its upper and lower. Its red and white trim. It's tempting to gloss over this part, so you won't really see me. Deborah Landau is the author of two books of poetry. She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she earned her PhD. Currently she is the director of the NYU Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.

The Uses of the Body

Soft Targets

It is “always nighttime” in The Last Usable Hour—a series of linked lyric sequences set in midwinter New York City. At the heart of Deborah Landau’s second collection are epistolary love poems to an elusive “someone.” Here is a haunted singing voice, clear and spare, alone in the dark, alive with memory and desire yet hounded by premonitions of a calamitous future. The speaker in this “ghost book” is lucid and passionate, even as everything is disappearing—the streets deserted, the beloveds gone.

The Last Usable Hour

Existentialism takes on a glamorous flair in Deborah Landau’s dazzling new collection. Through a series of poems preoccupied with loneliness and mortality, Skeletons flashes with prismatic effect across the persistent allure of the flesh. Initiated during Brooklyn’s early lockdown, the book reflects the increasingly troubling simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos, and the discontents of our virtual lives amidst the threats of a pandemic and corrosive politics. Spring blooms relentlessly while the ambulances siren by. Against the mounting pressure that propels the acrostic “Skeletons,” a series of interstitial companion poems titled “Flesh” negotiate intimacy and desire. The collection culminates in an ecstatic sequence celebrating the love and connection that persist despite our fraught present moment. Shrugging off her own anxiety and disillusionment with characteristic humor and pitch-perfect cadence, Landau finds levity in pyrotechnic lines, sonic play, and a wholly original language, asking: “Any way outta this bag of bones?” 

Skeletons

Janis Joplin

Landau creates "a poetry of vibrant physicality, open to joy and to failure."-Mark Doty

Starred Review in Publishers Weekly: "Through the cadence of these poems, which sometimes resemble lullabies in their dreaminess and gorgeous lyricism, Landau captures the ways humans persist, despite our collective anxiety, in our longing for 'something tender, something that might bloom.'” Deborah Landau’s fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets, draws a bullseye on humanity’s vulnerable flesh and corrupted world. In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places—subways, cafes, street corners—into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind. “O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon/enough what’s the rush,” Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.

Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. "You'll find a stunning cleanliness of movement and image in these delicious, evocative, sexy poems. Hooray for a writer who can weave presence and absence, longing and loss of longing, into a tapestry of language as rich, honest, and compelling as this"--Naomi Shihab Nye. "With depth, assurance, and astonishing savoir faire Landau makes ORCHIDELIRIUM a genuine orchid of a book, a vivid and riveting new bloom in American letters"--Molly Peacock.

Orchidelirium

Deborah Landau's fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets, draws a bull's-eye on humanity's vulnerable flesh and corrupted world. In this ambitious lyric sequence, fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an endangered planet on which all inhabitants are "soft targets". Her melancholic examinations recall life's uncanny ability to transform ordinary places - subways, cafés, street corners - into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind. 'O you who want to slaughter us, we'll be dead soon / enough what's the rush,' Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st-century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the US recall her grandmother's flight from Nazi Germany. Deborah Landau is director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She has published three previous collections in the US, most recently The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011) with Copper Canyon Press. CNN commissioned an op ed piece from her, 'We are all soft targets', in the light of US inaction on gun control following the latest shootings in August 2019.

Deborah Landau

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