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Soft Targets

Soft Targets

by Deborah Landau
Soft Targets
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Soft Targets

Soft Targets

by Deborah Landau

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781556595660
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication date: 04/30/2019
Pages: 80
Product dimensions: 0.70(w) x 2.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Deborah Landau is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her latest collection, Soft Targets (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020) follows two other Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press in the US, The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011). Her debut collection, Orchidelirium, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Soft Targets was widely reviewed in the US, featured on Oprah and in podcasts from Paris Review and The New Yorker (reading and interview with Kevin Young), and was one of Lithub’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2019’, Book Riot’s ’50 Must-Read Collections of 2019’, AM New York’s ‘5 New Standout Poetry Books’ and Bustle’s ‘Thirteen Poetry Collections You Need to Read This Spring’. 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. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and was included on ‘Best of 2015’ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, and included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Read an Excerpt

O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon

enough what’s the rush. This our only world.

As you can see it has a problem, as you can see

the citizens are hanging heavy, the citizens’ minds are out



Eros, eros, in Paris we stayed all night in a seraphic cocktail haze

despite the blacked out theater, the shuttered panes

tonight we’re the most tender of soft targets,

reclining by the river pulpy with alcohol and all a-sloth



Monsieur can we get a few more? There are unmistakable signs

of trouble, but we have days and days still

let’s be giddy, maybe, time lights a little fire

we are animal hungry down to our delicate bones



O beautiful habits of living,

let me dwell on you awhile







In the cut of Mercy she’s in my arms



In the cut of Cruelty she’s done,



a blood slump on the subway floor.



The double cut.



Can we live this way?



I think someone has done grave injury.



I think person or persons.



I think we’re losing by default.



Slaughter happened around the planet.



We stayed in the thicket whipping up love.









This is my plangent note to the ambassadors of love.



(All dreaming now is retroactive.)



The radioactive someday is here.



Our kings are cranks, crooks, incongruous.



They are improper, ill equipped.



How is it we pushed the handle down and they popped out?



Toasted!



And now they sit at the head of our table.



Can we be excused?



Scurrilous scumbags, x-rays of greed, they move themselves



up the flagpole, razing the trees.

Table of Contents

When it comes to this fleshed neck 3

There were real officers in the streets 7

Those nazis, they knew what to do with a soft 21

America wants it soft 31

Into the sheets we slipped, a crisis 41

The silence will be sudden then last 53

The snow goes to the gallows of a warm grass and what survives 59

Don't blame the wisteria 67

Notes 71

About the Author 73

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Related Subjects

Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
American poetry->Women authors->21st century
Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
American poetry->Women authors->21st century

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