The Last Usable Hour (Lannan Literary Selections)

"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

"Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure, desire, limitation, and, ultimately, disappearance."—Mark Doty

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.

blame the egg blame the fractured stones

at the bottom of the mind

blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug

the bulky king of trudge and stein

how I love a masculine in my parlor

his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums

in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking

I am the heavy hollow snared

the days are spring the days are summer

the days are nothing and not dead yet

Deborah Landau 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.