DEBORAH LANDAU

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023.” Her other books include Soft Targets (winner of The Believer Book Award), The Uses of the Body, and The Last Usable Hour, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of ″ 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. UK editions of her books include Soft Targets (Bloodaxe, 2020) and Skeletons (Corsair, 2024).

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Yale Review, 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 is a Professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

Photo credit: Jacqueline Mia Foster

Reviews

“Her arch observations create dark interior comedy that's reminiscent of Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath….Get this book.” —NPR All Things Considered

"Landau's earthy, angsty poems — about sex and mortality and cosmic despair — are insistently quotable, and more fun than they have any right to be. One opens with a line Emily Dickinson might have written, had she been on Twitter: "Sorry not sorry, said death.” --The New York Times Book Review

“Landau’s killer wit evokes Dorothy Parker crossed with Sylvia Plath—leaping spark after spark, growing to deadly dark fire … with lines of grave and startling beauty.” — Los Angeles Times

“By turns melancholy and exuberant, but always fuelled by formal and sonic play, this collection—structured around a sequence of “Skeleton” acrostics, punctuated by a series of “Flesh” interludes—measures the fact of mortality against the pleasures and possibilities of being alive. “ —The New Yorker, “Best Books of 2023”

"An unnerving, strangely erotic reminder of what the pandemic felt like . . . a perfect reflection of those months of enforced intimacy amid the threat of death." —Washington Post

“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.” — Literary Journal, starred review

“[Deborah Landau writes] a thrilling meditation on the passages of a woman’s life.”— O, The Oprah Magazine

“In her latest collection, Deborah Landau writes lush, sensual lyrics to reconcile both the beauty and the unrelenting vulnerability of the body, ‘the soft target.’ The poems trace patterns of violence—global and local, past and present—to convey the constant threat of destruction that looms over so many ‘softs’ in our precarious present. All the while, the poems grapple with what it means to live with pleasure and tenderness amid the shadow of imminent doom.” —The Believer

“Deborah Landau has spent her life as a poet articulating a poetics of the body. Finding ways that a lyric can enter the space between what the body knows and what the mind wants. This cool as smoked ice new book deals with how that division collapses in a state of fear….Terse and yet lyrical, floating in white space on the page like stark, intimate thoughts, Soft Targets is a riveting example of how we cannot take the body out of thinking, and we shouldn’t. ” — Lithub

“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.’” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Vital, beautiful, and complex — an important read for our times.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

“Throughout this collection, Landau’s stereoscopic vision splits: one eye stares into the void; the other stays trained on the luxuries that embodiment allows and mortality quickens. This double sense of life-in-death manifests in nearly every poem….These poems are conversational memento mori, sprinkled with chatty, O’Haraesque bursts right out the gate: “Sorry not sorry, said death.” The voice is delightfully propulsive—and compulsive—as it works against the potential monolith of the acrostic form. The surprising line breaks and enjambment teeter asymmetrically to exhilarating effect.” —Lara Glenum, Poetry Foundation

"Landau writes gorgeously about the necessity of living with both beauty and pain, of the war between love and terror, the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos …. It’s a tribute to Landau’s prodigious poetic gifts that she can hold the paradox in her hands so well, simultaneously allowing for hope and complicating it.” — New York Journal of Books

“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 her most political book.” — Major Jackson, The Boston Globe

“Landau’s skeletons are not only epigrammatic acrostic poems, but entire short stories, nuptial arrangements, drunken erotic meanderings…. Whether humour or misery or pleasure is explored, the collection reminds us that “these bones were made for us”. A deeply contemporary and human book from a poet asking if we are “done with life”, because she is “still so into it”, and it shows. —-The Guardian

"Despite the gravity of the subject matter, the poems steer clear of melodrama, and Landau’s self-effacing humor and playfulness help keep the tone light. Still, the work is profoundly philosophical, asking the eternal question of how to live in the shadow of death, how to carry on in spite of our imminent demise….Like fireweed, the poems in Soft Targets emerge from the scorched earth of contemporary life to show us not just how to survive, but how to thrive." — The Rumpus

“A plea for both the planet as it warms, and the world of the West, which threatens to tear itself apart through violence and "weak and disordered" governments. In the end, Landau adopts an almost Whitman-like singing in the face of her despair.” —AM New York

“Despite this stark vision, Soft Targets can be surprisingly buoyant, with pacing and wit that sometimes recall Beckett: “Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time? / We’ve wasted our time.” The language is fresh and consonant, and the forms, airy—often couplets or single-line stanzas. Additionally, Landau finds “redress”—if sporadic, partial—in human touch, a snowfall, our “small span of time.” The results are nimble and compelling, poems that render the grimness of our moment without being sunk by it.” — The Antioch Review

“It is not an abstract language of rights and duties that [Landau] marshals against the encroachments of tyranny, but a poet’s concern with the joy and unpredictability of human relationships and the endless surprise of the natural world… In the end, what Landau returns to is a sense of the body, which despite being so easily breakable also supplies, in its openness and sensitivity, so much enjoyment in being mortal…” — The North

“This edgy, unsettling work is an extended reflection on vulnerability, ways in which we try to ignore it and find refuge from it… This is an immensely powerful work, best read straight through. The cumulative effect of its imagery, its lyricism, and cadences is quite startling.” — Frank Startup, The School Librarian

“Landau’s intense lyric sequence explores this sense of corporeal disempowerment, anxiety and anomie, placing it within its historical and political context by moving us through a range of interlinked scenarios, variations on the theme that we are all soft targets… With this resolve to relish the everyday moment in the face of violence and discord, Soft Targets ends on a note of hard-won, bittersweet optimism; the best we can hope for in these unsettling times.” — Oliver Dixon, The Poetry Review

“Deborah Landau’s new book is pervaded by anxious awareness of our vulnerability. She’s particularly concerned with human violence, whether the random violence of terrorists or the systematic violence of the state... but also with environmental degradation and catastrophic illness. There are many brief evocations of beauty, love and pleasure but they’re always under threat. The very handsomeness of the book as a physical object seems designed to heighten unease... Against all the odds, though, the lyricism continues to express the poet’s yearning for a more innocent, more humane and loving world, and hope never quite dies.” — Edmund Prestwich, London Grip

“An essential meditation for our era. “ —Nylon