Monday Must Read! The Uses of the Body by Deborah Landau

Deborah Landau is the author of three collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, Tin House, and The New York Times. She directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

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Purchase The Uses of the Body here, thanks to Copper Canyon Press. 

“A thrilling meditation on the passages of a woman’s life.”  

                                                                                           –O, The Oprah Magazine

“Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but for girls (and women): Deborah Landau’s vividly relatable third collection, The Uses of the Body, reminds us that coming of age lasts well beyond adolescence. ”  

                                                                                          –Vogue

 

Deborah Landau’s third collection, The Uses of the Body, is propelled by two unanticipated events–a death and a birth. The drives and vulnerabilities of the female body, and its various “uses,” fill these lyrically haunting poems with tenderness, regret, and desire. The poems slant and swerve as Landau explores the complexities of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, conjuring a cherished domestic life beset by ennui and illness and singing often unspoken truths.

The uses of the body are wake up.

The uses of the body, illusion.

The uses of the body. Rinse,repeat.

To make another body.

September. Draw the blanket up.

Lace your shoes.

The major and minor passions.

Sunlight. Hair.

The basic pleasures. Tomatoes, Keats,

meeting a smart man for a drink.

The uses of the body.

It is only a small house. It gets older.