Deborah Landau
“I’m not interested in poems that simply narrate or enact a performance of a life while the reader watches. It’s important that the work feel distilled and transformed. Poems that are elliptical or take a sidelong approach are more compelling, and feel more accurately aligned with lived experience, too.”
“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.”
“In her shining fifth collection (after Soft Targets), Landau chooses the somewhat unexpected acrostic form as a container for her punchy riffs on modern life. Spelling ‘skeleton’ down the left margin, these poems wield a lightness of tone with subject matter that has preoccupied her across several books. . . . These poems unfurl a resonant commentary on loneliness and mortality.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Vital, beautiful, and complex — an important read for our times.”
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, and a forthcoming novel, Red Life (Graywolf).
Her previous books include Skeletons (Copper Canyon, 2023), one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023,” Soft Targets (Copper Canyon, 2019), winner of The Believer Book Award, The Uses of the Body (Copper Canyon, 2015), named one of “12 Favorite Poetry Books of 2015” by The New Yorker, The Last Usable Hour (Copper Canyon, 2011) 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.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, The Nation, APR, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Best American Erotic Poems and in three editions of The Best American Poetry.
Asked in an interview about advice for beginning writers, she responded, “Read as much as you can, write as much as you can. Keep your head down and do your work. Share your writing with trusted readers and don’t rush to publish. It’s better to take your time and send the work out when it’s truly ready. Also, I think it’s important to find satisfaction in the writing of poems as an end in itself—as a kind of deep and sustaining expressive pleasure. A singular focus on contests, publication, and prizes becomes an endless trap and distraction.”
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.
“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 (“The uses of the body, illusion”) interspersed with lines of grave and startling beauty.”
“Deborah Landau is (a) fierce poet of desire...Her stunning third book, The Uses of the Body, offers a meditation on aging and loss: a series of elegant, long poems that sing, hesitate and haunt.”
“The poems of Landau’s stunning second collection are dark, urgent, sexy, deeply sad, and, above all, powerful....Landau’s abandon is thrilling in the way danger always is....””
“Uncross your legs,’ one of Deborah Landau’s poems instructs us, ‘and leave the house…’ The poems in Orchidelirium walk out, indeed, into the world of the body, as Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure, desire, limitation, and, ultimately, disappearance. This poet’s faith that bodies are ‘better than the alphabet’ creates a poetry of vibrant physicality, open to joy and to failure — and, in a gripping final sequence, to the griefs and anxieties visited upon the body, in New York City, in the terrible beginning of this century.”
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