Soft Targets

Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets registers the body’s vulnerability in a time of global crisis, deepening the themes of her acclaimed third book, The Uses of the Body. The fear of annihilation expands beyond the self in this ambitious lyric sequence to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” In a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change, what becomes of the quiet expressions of love between friends and family? As neo-Nazis march in the 21st Century, the poet recalls her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1938. “Much trouble at hand, yet the lilies still,” Landau writes, confounded by the simultaneity of pleasure and pain, comfort and suffering – the clash of Eros and Thanatos. “Now bring me a souvenir from the desecrated city, something tender, something that might bloom.”

These are vital, necessary poems for our present moment.

“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

"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

"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

So I told the sky it should stay blue
told my daughter she should stay breathing
told my love he should and we would
as the monster storms showed their teeth
and the fires flared and the wines
weren’t plum enough to numb us
and our leaders’ virulent egos seethed–
(people dying off as if it were nothing
to leave this planet as if it were a breeze)