Soft Targets

*WINNER OF THE BELIEVER BOOK AWARD

• 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.'"
• "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  (The Believer Book Award Citation)

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.