The Last Usable Hour

<p>“The poems of Landau's stunning second collection are dark urgent sexy deeply sad and above all powerful.—<I>Publishers Weekly</I> starred review</I></p><p>“Landau's intimate lonely poems are profoundly engaged with the experience of the self in its starkest moments: when it is deprived nocturnal barely lingual...She creates a deeply erotic and resonant encounter between the lyric I and its solitude. —<I>The Boston Review</I></p><p>“She is both confessional and direct like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Her taut elegant highly controlled constructions meditate upon yearning and selfhood… Landau reminds us of the nuanced beauty of language as through their directness her tight graceful poems make readers feel as if they spoke only to them. —<I>Booklist</I></p><p>“These beautiful harrowing poems are new-minted and young but also age-old broken and wise. She has found the perfect tone for her ‘city of interiors.'—<I>Huffington Post</I></p><p>Hooray for a writer who can weave presence and absence longing and loss of longing into a tapestry of language as rich honest and compelling as this.—Naomi Shihab Nye</p><p>Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure desire limitation and ultimately disappearance.—Mark Doty</p><p>It is always nighttime in Deborah Landau's second collection—a series of linked lyric sequences including insomniac epistolary love poems to an elusive someone. Here is a haunted singing voice clear and spare alive with memory and desire yet hounded by premonitions of a calamitous future. The speaker in this ghost book is lucid and passionate even as everything is disappearing.</p><p><I>blame the egg blame the fractured stones<BR>at the bottom of the mind</I></p><p><I>blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug<BR>the bulky king of trudge and stein</I></p><p><I>how I love a masculine in my parlor<BR>his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums</I></p><p><I>in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking<BR>I am the heavy hollow snared</I></p><p><I>the days are spring the days are summer<BR>the days are nothing and not dead yet</I></p><p><B>Deborah Landau</B> was educated at Stanford University Columbia University and Brown University where she was a Javits Fellow and received a PhD in English and American literature. She co-hosts Open Book on Slate.com and is the Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program. She lives in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.</p><BR>