Soft Targets

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, cafés, 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. Her fifth collection, Skeletons, was published in the UK by Corsair in 2024.

Believer Book Award citation: '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.'

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.

'Although...Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets was originally published in the States in 2019, its UK release in June 2020 seemed startlingly timely and prescient, coming as it did only a few
weeks after the death of George Floyd...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

'There are times when the truth of a poem speaks so directly to its context, that reading it provokes an almost physiological reaction: your pulse quickens, and you feel as if something essential has shifted in your understanding of the present. Few poets can maintain that urgency throughout a collection without sounding shrill or forced... But the two books reviewed here [Carolyn Forché's In the Lateness of the World and Deborah Landau's Soft Targets] achieve precisely that. Both are so effective at demanding an affective response that they shake the reader out of the sofa’s comfort, all the better to address the injustices of our moment (which has been ‘marred by slaughter’, in Deborah Landau’s words), and impart a visceral recognition of our own agency vis-à-vis the otherwise inscrutable weight of the world’s pain.' – Theophilus Kwek, The North

'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 [on Soft Targets]

'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

'An essential meditation for our era.' – Nylon

'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, boxed/starred review

'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 also her most political book.' – Major Jackson, The Boston Globe

‘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

'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.' – Lit Hub

Deborah Landau is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her fourth collection, Soft Targets (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2020) followed two other Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press in the US, The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011). Her debut collection, Orchidelirium, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her fifth collection, Skeletons, was published in the UK by Corsair in 2024.

Soft Targets, winner of poetry category of the Believer Book Award 2019, was widely reviewed in the US, featured on Oprah and in podcasts from Paris Review and The New Yorker (reading and interview with Kevin Young), and was one of Lithub’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2019’, Book Riot’s ’50 Must-Read Collections of 2019’, AM New York’s ‘5 New Standout Poetry Books’ and Bustle’s ‘Thirteen Poetry Collections You Need to Read This Spring’. 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.

The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and was included on ‘Best of 2015’ 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.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, 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 lives in Brooklyn with her family.