Soft Targets

Bloodaxe, Hexham 2020 (1st publ.)

Landau, Deborah
Soft Targets
Bloodaxe, Hexham 2020 (1st publ.)
Größe: gr 8°
Seitenzahl: 71 S.
Einband: OBrosch.
Vorl. Spr. Orig.: Englisch
Monographie
Gedichte/Prosagedichte
Buch
- Verlagsinfo: 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. 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. [L200/land.d/...]

978 1 78037 544 1