Deborah Landau is the author of four collections of poetry. Her third, The Uses of the Body, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and named one of 12 Favorite Poetry Books of 2015 by The New Yorker, one of the “16 Best Poetry Books of 2015″ by BuzzFeed, a “Book We Can’t Wait to Read” by Vogue, and in the top “8 New Books to Savor” by O, the Oprah Magazine. She is also the author of the Last Usable Hour and Orchidelirium, which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye to win the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The New York Times, and her poems have been widely anthologized. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. Landau’s fourth book of poetry, Soft Targets (Copper Canyon Press), 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.”
