Elizabeth Knapp Reviews Deborah Landau's Soft Targets

At The Rumpus, Elizabeth Knapp guides readers through Deborah Landau's fourth poetry collection, Soft Targets, a book rife with "tension between sex and death, procreation and destruction, joy and terror that drives the collection as a whole," writes Knapp. More: 

Excluding the first and final single-page poems, Soft Targets is divided into six of these linked sequences, with titles taken from the first lines. Although punctuation is used throughout, Landau relies mostly on the line and enjambment to carry the music, as couplets, tercets, and single-stanza poems appear to float on the page. However, the ethereality of the form along with the lively, irreverent tone contrast sharply with the subject matter, and with each new sequence, the stakes become higher as the threat level increases. Beginning with terrorism and progressing to fascism, gun violence, and ultimately, climate change, these poems are so timely they feel timeless, trapped in a sort of eternal present, a time capsule of our current precarious state.

“Existence is killing us,” proclaims the speaker in the first longer sequence, “there were real officers in the streets,” which describes scenes of daily Parisian life after the 2016 terror attack in Nice. “I don’t want to see what can’t be unseen,” she says, but what the speaker sees around her is indifference and apathy, a collective refusal to acknowledge human suffering:

Still there was bread on the plate, still wine,
while the streets filled with refugees.

And the French stepped over them
en route to patisseries, cafés—

Massive powers that be
what will be?

We smoke our pipes
to forget you

Included in this criticism is the speaker herself, who almost seems to revel in her self-delusion and denial:

It was good getting drunk in the undulant city,
whiskey lopping off the day’s fear—

dawn came with an element of Xanax,
dusk came and I dumbed myself down.

It is these moments of self-reflexive irony and subtle humor that save the collection from becoming merely a banner for the liberal cause. As well as being too personal, these poems are too broad in scope, too restless in their questioning and search for meaning to concern themselves with partisan politics, even as they denounce the players within that system. “How is it to have a body today / to walk in this city, to run?” asks this speaker in this sequence, as Landau returns to the subjects of her third book, The Uses of the Body. Here, however, the individual body is considered within the context of “the global body” and individual lives as cogs in the “planet wheel.”

Learn more at The Rumpus.