Soft Targets by Deborah Landau
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 opinion piece from her, ‘We are all soft targets’, in the light of US inaction on gun control following the latest shootings in August 2019.
An essential meditation for our era* Nylon *
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'. -- Boxed/starred review * Publishers Weekly *
Deborah Landau has developed a style of writing poetry that reminds me of Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson, these long poems that feel dreamy because they are so lyrical. This is also her most political book. -- Major Jackson * The Boston Globe *
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'. -- Boxed/starred review * Publishers Weekly *
Deborah Landau has developed a style of writing poetry that reminds me of Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson, these long poems that feel dreamy because they are so lyrical. This is also her most political book. -- Major Jackson * The Boston Globe *
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 opinion 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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781780375441 |
| ISBN 10 | 1780375441 |
| Title | Soft Targets |
| Author | Deborah Landau |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2020-06-25 |
| Number of pages | 80 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |