Deborah Landau
Deborah Landau Poems
That summer there was no girl left in me.
It gradually became clear.
It suddenly became.
...
I had the idea of sitting still
while others rushed by.
I had the thought of a shop
that still sells records.
...
the moon might rise and it might not
and if it brings a ghost light we will read beneath it
...
At night, down the hall into the bedroom we go.
In the morning we enter the kitchen.
Places, please. On like this,
...
I'm on a bike and someone's name is forming.
The road is potholes the road is dust.
Cruising the dirt, the meadow humming with bugs.
...
It scares me to watch
a woman hobble along
the sidewalk, hunched adagio
...
Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one
running in the yard pulse pulse the absence.
Leave them not to the empty yards.
...
•
When G died began the midnight panic attacks.
He spoke French and English
but that didn't help.
...
•
Well look, the wedding guests are here again.
Why not just send a card?
Snapshot. Snapshot. Smile and kiss.
...
All day I watch the neighbor's boy
paint the side of his house.
...
Deborah Landau Biography
Deborah Landau is the author of The Uses of the Body (2015) and The Last Usable Hour (2011), both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium (2004), which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her poems have been widely anthologized in places such as The Best American Erotic Poems, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. Landau studied at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and earned a PhD in English and American Literature. For many years she co-directed the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series and co-hosted the video interview program Open Book on Slate.com. Landau is Director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she also teaches. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.)
The Best Poem Of Deborah Landau
Welcome to the Future
Richard propped up the bottles
like bowling pins
I had fallen into despair
did this bother him
when Richard left I broke
my throat I bit my tongue
cracked teeth my mouth split my lip
smashed chairs in the bar trashed
poems I was writing
all this breaking was very expensive
there is no Richard but I think it was Richard
who had the idea of pouring libations
because of the stumbling thirst
because our lives are like that
I am writing this to do as right as possible by Richard
think back to the bed look out at the bar
the fragrant medicinal flasks
I don't care to drink anymore because when I drink
it makes me hopeless
Richard, are you going to come back
to the bar where you belong
or just leave me here
here is a flask
I am tired of being metaphysical
our bar is a winter bar
at night we need the dream
of all the objects lined up in a row
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4/25/2024 1:28:17 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Deborah Landau has an exceptional talent for making words dance to the tune of reality so gracefully, so beautifully and so meaningfully. In the Last Usable Hour, she says: “…this city is dry and the people all wanting each with a coin purse each with a thirst in her mouth…”.