Soft targets

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." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

O you who want to slaughter us, we'll be dead soonenough what's the rush. This our only world. As you can see it has a problem, as you can see the citizens are hanging heavy, the citizens' minds are out Eros, eros, in Paris we stayed all night in a seraphic cocktail hazedespite the blacked out theater, the shuttered panes tonight we're the most tender of soft targets,reclining by the river pulpy with alcohol and all a-sloth Monsieur can we get a few more? There are unmistakable signs of trouble, but we have days and days stilllet's be giddy, maybe, time lights a little firewe are animal hungry down to our delicate bones O beautiful habits of living, let me dwell on you awhileIn the cut of Mercy she's in my armsIn the cut of Cruelty she's done, a blood slump on the subway floor. The double cut.Can we live this way?I think someone has done grave injury.I think person or persons.I think we're losing by default.Slaughter happened around the planet.We stayed in the thicket whipping up love.This is my plangent note to the ambassadors of love. (All dreaming now is retroactive.)The radioactive someday is here.Our kings are cranks, crooks, incongruous. They are improper, ill equipped. How is it we pushed the handle down and they popped out? Toasted! And now they sit at the head of our table.Can we be excused?Scurrilous scumbags, x-rays of greed, they move themselvesup the flagpole, razing the trees. Excerpted from Soft Targets by Deborah Landau All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.