The Last Usable Hour (Lannan Literary Selections) by Deborah Landau

The Last Usable Hour (Lannan Literary Selections) Reviews

• 
  James

  A very urban voice (NYC) talks of desire, memory, and doubt. Often speaking to an otherwise unidentified "someone," these poems speak with yearning, passion, and sometimes desperation. Not as strong as her more recent effort
  The Uses of the Body, but definitely a strong voice.
• 
  morgan

  god
• 
  Jeremy

  I'd rather watch you doing it
  than do it myself.
  I'd rather hear about it.
  I want to be told.
  I'd rather read about it.
  I'd rather just sit here.
  Hold the mask over my face
  while you do it to me.

  
  
  And so begins The Last Usable Hour. Landau's sophomore collection is anything but sophomoric. Its tonal structure is more decisive in its anonymity (the poems are untitled), more visceral, and dare I say better edited than her debut collection,
  Orchidelirium. It isn't necessarily a confident voice that speaks these poems, but an honest one in its insecurity, a voice that lies dormant in all of us and could belong to more than one speaker because it could in fact belong to anyone. Most of all, I feel as though I've completed these poems in a way by reading them, and that I was invited to participate with their deep devotion to the ephemeral, their oblique sadness and nihilism.
  
  Throughout, Landau frequently takes familiar concepts and images and warps them to great effect, turning the safe and unassuming into the frightening and maddening. Early on, someone speaks:
  
  

  I sleep beside the river.
  The river often sleeps when I'm awake.
  
  Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
  Better be shoving off again and into the night.

  
  
  Can we really ever know anything for what it is? This troubling thought is felt deeply here, then shrugged off in the last line: "Oh well!" To me, these lines comment on anxiety, a theme that preoccupies the collection most successfully at the beginning. Later, a speaker offers some friendly advice:
  
  

  You should find something definite to subscribe to
  so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.

  
  
  But the manic speakers in this collection suggest that if the world teaches us how to interpret it, we can only ever subscribe to the fleeting and unknowable. As this dialogue between steady and skeptical speakers continues, the whole experience begins to read like one conglomerate inner monologue complicated by a mind turning psychic corners, effectively worrying art into existence.
  
  Unfortunately, sections two, three, and four pale in comparison. Here's one page from "Someone," the third section, in it's entirety:
  
  

  dear someone
  so strange to see you today
  
  taking up more than your share
  of space
  
  we meet at the cafe
  because you are waiting there
  
  dear someone
  where did you buy your scarf
  
  do you like it
  I do

  
  
  These lines have a thin quality and don't quite rise to the same heights or engage with the same inquiry posed on the following page:
  
  

  immaculate middle-of-the-night quiet
  
  rainlessness
  
  the late moony sadness
  of the one specific mosquito
  
  dear someone
  
  you habituate me to the invisible
  I exit through you not as myself

  
  
  If not as yourself, then as whom? As an intimate and particular "someone," or a literal someone, so essentially anyone? As the reader? These lines contemplate the transferal of consciousness from one being to the next, and by extension its transfiguration. Into what and for whom, we can't really be sure (maybe because we can't ever really know a person, as the idea we're given in the first section would suggest), but it's an engaging question that serves as a critical takeaway.
  
  The Last Usable Hour falters when it recycles the same language to assert the beauty of ambiguity. It excels in its insularity, especially when it introduces and extends the presence of desire as a way to complicate the inevitable void that plagues the human condition. My favorite lines from this collection help build this idea, and they echo the sexiness it begins with:
  
  

  
  more is more
  
  which is why
  we perverse ourselves
  
  into the many shapes we make
  spared the separation
  
  praise
  the with-joy
  
  your lower
  between my
  
  conjoined
  open-necked
  smutting in
  and out of it
  
  happy
  have us all inside

  
  
  If the title is of any indication, Landau's third collection,
  The Uses of the Body, hopefully develops ideas about the meaning of desire in a supposedly meaningless world even further.
• 
  Gerry LaFemina

  This is a wonderfully quirky book of lyrics... It's a NY book, which already makes it dear to my heart, and although I find sometimes its lack of punctuation, its lack of titling individual poems sometimes gimmick-y, I find the thematic wholeness of the book to be compelling. There's a quietness to these poems that offsets the bustle and combustibility of NY.
• 
  A. Anupama

  The last two poems create a beautiful net---caught! I love a whole collection of untitled.
• 
  Felicia Caro

  In a world of scrolling, where I am constantly reading more of the same, unimpressive, kind but not potent, charming but not soulful stuff, stuck amidst the Lang Leavs, Rupi Kaurs, and Nayyirah Waheeds (sorry, not sorry, in my humble opinion only)... Deborah Landau's small book of poetry, "The Last Usable Hour" struck a resonant, harmonious chord with me.
  
  There's not too much to *see* in this book. Her poems are textured emotionally and are sparsely descriptive. Sometimes she seems to be talking to herself ("What the hell do you think you're doing?), at just the tip of a certain kind of madness. She remembers little things people say, just a line or two, or how they seemed ("Across the table his mind right there... behind his talking face") she thinks things to herself that conflict with what is actually happening, she's distracted yet not, sometimes stuck in trains of thought, and always drawn in by desire. What is this desire? It's nothing, she seems to write, within her laconic prose. It's there, but I'm unaffected, detached, distant. Just like... just like. Streams of consciousness.
  
  My favorite aspect of "The Last Usable Hour", and I think I'll probably find this in more poetry by Landau, is her ability to capture the essence of the moment without becoming taken away by it. She is coolly distant, but fully present. Observant and sentient. It's a melancholic sort of beauty to do this, I know. It's for those who anticipate the end of the party while the party is still gaining momentum. Who gets left behind? Who stays? How does it feel in the morning? How does it feel now? What is it that I want? What is it that I am doing that is just this automatic obscurity of action and reaction? She is sentient but is she real? And though perhaps there is a sense of desolation and the fact of being crestfallen, still she seems to say: thank you for letting me feel this.
  
  Her poetry connects this desolate and crestfallen state of the soul to her immediate geography. Her place. (In fact, New York.) Her "siren-wracked, river-bordered, pigeon shitted, skyline bunched, and branchless" setting. But amidst this... "such spooked radiance, the creeping up of it".
  
  Oh, "The Last Usable Hour" reminds me why I love poetry. It's the essence of the thing, whatever it - the thing - is. Nothing else needs to be done, because, when you're breathing in life through poetry, you're already there.
  
  "...and death in the air like the smell of tunnels... beautiful and defaced"
• 
  Eris Varga

  I don't really see what people say about Landau reflected in her poetry. There were two I quite liked and one I didn't like but got stuck with, so I've given it 2 Stars.
• 
  Kimberly

  I quite enjoyed the "Dear Someone" set of poems, but the others didn't leave much of an impression on me.
• 
  Christina M Rau

  The poems in Deborah Landau's The Last Usable Hour take all these mundane, bland words and jumble them into a free flowing almost-story that propels forward. Some names of people arise here and there, causing curiosity and solidifying a plot of sorts. The short lines and short stanzas create a staccato beat, and the lack of individual titles leaving only four titles sections with poems separated by an asterisk allow for the beat to continue on and on. This is a collection that can be finished in twenty minutes, but the tiny details cause for another re-through, and then perhaps one more. Nothing here jumps out and wows, but in its quietness, it is successful.
• 
  Annie

  Disappointing. Sparse, lyrical poems that didn't reach beyond the personal. The central "Someone" series of relationship poems was the most developed, but they were only a faint echo of what Kevin Young accomplished in the Sleepwalking Psalms.