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, 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 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. The American edition of Soft Targets won the Believer Book Award Prize for Poetry 2019. 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.

Paperback

About the author

Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons, which was one of The New Yorker's "Best Books of 2023." Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and in three editions of The Best American Poetry. Her honors include The Believer Book Award, the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

deborahlandau.com