Soft Targets
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Starred Review in Publishers Weekly: "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.'”
Deborah Landau’s fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets, draws a bullseye on humanity’s vulnerable flesh and corrupted world. In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled 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 United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fourth book from Landau (The Uses of the Body) addresses the anxiety of living among dangers potential and palpable, from terrorism to climate change. As citizens, we are vulnerable to those "who want to slaughter us," and yet, as the speaker remarks, "I had a body, unwearied, vital, despite the funeral in everything." This proves the central tension of the collection: the speaker is conflicted about how we might go about our days and nights drinking wine, raising a family when around the world, threat abounds. Poems in loose couplets, tercets, and single-line stanzas contain Landau's signature lush, lyrical language ("would you like a lunch of me in the soft/ in its long delirium?") placed in contrast to the immediacy of "Kalashnikov assault rifles,/ submachine guns, ammunition," which enact the dissonance of pleasure-seeking while the news "spatulas in on the Twitter feed." But the very bodies that make us soft targets, Landau suggests, also make us lovers, "lustrous from time to time,/ in a garden, in a city, in a wood melodious with pine." 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."
