Deborah Landau Poetry Reading, Katonah Poetry Series

On Sunday, November 17, the Katonah Poetry Series (KPS) is honored to present  Deborah Landau. The Los Angeles Times compared Landau to “Dorothy Parker crossed with Sylvia Plath—leaping spark after spark, growing to deadly dark fire … with lines of grave and startling beauty.” At once lyrical and earthy, Landau’s poetry bears witness to the vulnerability of the body in a time of global crisis. Of her most recent book, Soft Targets, Publishers Weekly wrote: “Through the cadence of these poems, which sometimes resemble lullabies in their dreaminess and gorgeous lyricism, Landau captures the ways humans persist, despite our collective anxiety, in our longing for ‘something tender, something that might bloom.’” Hers is an important voice in these uncertain times.

Deborah Landau is the author of four collections of poetry: Soft Targets (2019); The Uses of the Body (2015); and The Last Usable Hour (2011), all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium (2011), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Landau’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times; has been selected for The Best American Poetry, and included in anthologies such as Resistance, Rebellion, Life, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English. She teaches in and directs the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.