The Uses of the Body by Deborah Landau

The Uses of the Body Reviews

• 
  D.A.

  Deborah Landau's audacity is searing and ineffaceable. I have been indelibly and delightfully scarred by her work:
  
  Before you have kids,
  you get a dog.
  
  Then when you get a baby,
  you wait for the dog to die.
  
  When the dog dies,
  it's a relief.
  
  When your babies aren't babies,
  you want a dog again.
  
  Poetry lives for such bold music and acuminate wit. Landau's poems are living monsters that will eat your brains.
  
  
• 
  Alarie

  Considering this book was recommended by O, The Oprah Magazine, which I usually agree with on books, and that it has many strong ratings, I don't wish to pull the rating down. I'm willing to concede that taste in poetry is highly subjective. This book simply didn't resonate with me. I've read worse. I liked passages here and there, but didn't engage with this collection.
• 
  Sanjay Varma

  I liked some moments. Here are a few stanzas from "Mr and Mrs End of Suffering" where her plain, direct, clipped language works quite well:
  
  In opera you get what you need
  It's not marriage
  
  A man to sleep with.
  A place to lay my head at night.
  
  He knows every road of me.
  Can find the turnoff without a map.
  
  Can drive along the low stone wall
  In the dark until he reaches the open field
  
  But honestly, her style didn't resonate with me. Many of her poems read like drafts instead of final versions. For example, from "Minutes, Years":
  
  If the brakes don't work.
  If the pesticides won't wash off.
  If the seventh floor pushes a brick
  
  Out the window and it lands on my head.
  If a tremor, menopause. Cancer. ALS.
  These are the ABCs of my fear.
  
• 
  Tiffany

  Beautiful. I devoured this book and then immediately reread it.
• 
  Valerie

  Random words. Punctuation weird, yeah.
  Thoughts scrambly.
  
  Did
  not
  connect.
  
  Not
  even
  a
  little.
• 
  Courtney Clark

  This collection was so resonant for me. I read it and then went straight back to the beginning to read it over again.
  
  
• 
  Natalie

  This was an enjoyable summer read. Though you can move through the collection quickly, the poems could be discusses at length. My favorite sections were Mr and Mrs End of Suffering & The City of Paris Has You in Mind Tonight.
  
  Some of the poems are more abstract than what I generally appreciate, but I like Landau's use of language:
  "The major and minor passions./Sunlight. Hair./The basic pleasures. Tomatoes, Keats,/meeting a smart man for a drink."
  
  and
  
  "with book and teacups and ghosts/and time ample, a slow greedy feast./If there's no one to walk with all over this city/you can go to the movies can hurry stop/buy a bunch of lavender, a book, a pastry/be someone distinct true personal and new."
• 
  Terri

  This is a delicious little book of poetry. Landau's writing about the body and how we move through the world is evocative, sensual, intimate, and powerful.
  
  Because I had a baby this year, I was especially drawn to her poems about new motherhood. When she describes being home with a newborn like being snowed in with summer - that stayed with me so clearly.
  
  Her other poems spoke to me too - she made me smell ripe, damp Earth and rainy city streets.
  
  Will definitely be reading more.
• 
  Alisa

  Contemporary...
  
  "Jen says, Try to see the whole landscape
  of your life, not just the part that's collopasing."
  
  or
  
  "Ladies and gentlemen, introducing
  Mr and Mrs of the moment now and dancing.
  
  Mr and Mrs End of Suffering
  Mr and Mrs Safe and Headed Where."
  
  Will read DL's other collections, for sure.
• 
  James

  A brutally honest and journey through poetry of a woman's life. It captures the questioning soul striving for answers through being single, being married, and becoming a mother, and finding none. Throughout it is an acerbic, funny, provocative meditation on what being a woman means in contemporary life. Highly recommended.
• 
  Sam

  Some nice lines/turn of phrase but nothing more than that. I didn't feel personally connected to it apart from this page:
  Before you have kids,
  You get a dog.
  Then when you get a baby,
  You wait for the dog to die.
  When the dog dies,
  it's a relief.
  When your babies aren't babies,
  You want a dog again.
• 
  Christie

  "Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale. / A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along.
  
  Borderless and open the days go on--"
• 
  Jessica

  Into it.
• 
  Andrea MacPherson

  3.5 stars
  
  Some lovely images and lines, very engaging. It did feel a bit repetitive in the long poems; I would have liked to see further variety in voice and form.
• 
  Whitney Archer

  I really liked certain poems, especially "I don't cook, but I could make a baby."
• 
  Simeon Berry

  Micro-blurb: sly dispatches from a wonderfully untenable embodiment.
• 
  Nancy

  These dare you awake. They are the voice, raw after crying, after thinking, stripped of anything that would get in the way of telling it real. I loved the stickiness of life and bodies these let me know, and very much the straight-eyed view of motherhood.
  
  We were fitful but happy we were facing off,
  figurines a big one and a little one
  
  dog's breath, armed and arming, we were sour
  and acid, milky and sweet, were visceral
  
  and snowed in in summer and this
  was celebrated and this was supreme.
• 
  Allison

  from “Mr and Mrs End of Suffering”
  
  The uses of the body are manifold.
  Lips, fingers, the back of the neck.
  
  One should make as full use as possible
  before time’s up. In Paradise.
  
  You should appreciate. Don’t squander.
  Take a deep juicy bite then swallow.
  
  Peaches are meant for tasting.
  In Paradise.
  
  We lay and many afternoons
  brought pleasure and relief.
  
  
  Sealey Challenge 5/31
• 
  Andrea Taylor

  I always love to discover a poet that I haven’t read before. Layers of meaning, layers of life. Beautiful interpretations. The heart always awakens by a greater fraction when we find something that inspires us.
• 
  meghan

  This one grew on me as I read. I'll need to re-read it to appreciate the early poems in the collection.
• 
  Jerry Smith

  I'm reading almost exclusively women when it comes to poetry.
  I like this one, the poems are short, a little on the abstract side and have a bouncy rhythm to them.
• 
  Kate

  too opaque and meandering even for me… i didn’t enjoy this collection ):
• 
  Terresa

  Reading this I feel paranoid and split open, a blister. Desperate, a modern Plath, as in:
  
  Have you a taste for a birth,
  for a bludgeoning?
  
  My favorite parts: the last bit of "Minutes, Years" and "I don't have a pill for that."
  
  
• 
  Jeremy

  If
  The Last Usable Hour, Landau's second collection, explores the meaning of desire in a supposedly meaningless world, The Uses of the Body explores the lack of desire in a world with endless meaning.
  
  Yes, Landau's speakers are still trying to find reasons to stay happy in these poems, but they're also deeply embedded in the physical world. A Parisian summer blooms while marriage, motherhood, pregnancy, birth, and death (so much death) occupy the collection on a subjective basis. As a result, our speakers are constantly responding to impending happenstance, the happenings themselves, and their glorious aftermaths. The female body is at work here, and so is a complex, fierce mind.
  
  Like The Last Usable Hour, lyric sequences are organized in sections primarily dealing with one or more of the aforementioned subjects. The compulsion to read each section as a long poem is more convincing here than in her previous collection since many of the thin, short poems need each other to exist in close proximity. Stylistically, a love child is born: The Uses of the Body features the familiarity and simplicity of
  Orchidelirium (her first collection) and the lyric architecture of The Last Usable Hour (which I actually prefer).
  
  This collection is most effective when its speakers critique the world's demands, the demands of others (particularly the male gaze), and what they demand from themselves. I think the last section, "Late Summer," does this best by demonstrating a kind of wry astonishment and effervescent word play, two qualities I've come to expect from Landau's poetry. However, in an earlier section titled "Mr and Mrs End of Suffering," a speaker lies down for the night with her partner and thinks to herself:
  
  

  
  I can see where I need to go
  but never get there.
  
  When I lie in bed my limbs go numb.
  When the sky darkens.
  
  The urge is there
  but also the mandate
  
  to tamp it down.
  Always the urge.
  
  Always the mandate.
  

  
  
  Haven't we all felt this tug toward responsibility? One can't help but ask themselves whose responsibility is tugging at them—and if it isn't their own, why should they care? Our unique, creative "urge" is what makes this life worth living. Landau implores us to be true to ourselves and not to let anyone or anything "tamp it down."
  
  Meanwhile, anxiety may rule The Last Usable Hour, but depression (postpartum?) rules The Uses of the Body. For example, we often get lines like, "...and the months go by like a dream not killing us yet." Later, some advice is given:
  
  

  
  Jen says, Try to see the whole landscape
  of your life, not just the part that's collapsing.
  

  
  
  On the next page, a speaker laments time, aging, the inevitability of death:
  
  

  
  I am twenty.
  I am thirty.
  I am forty years old.
  

  
  
  But then:
  
  

  
  A friend said, Listen,
  you have to try to calm down.
  

  
  
  Here, Landau is also our friend. These moments are healing for both the poems' speakers and their readers, but The Uses of the Body, while a more controlled effort than Orchidelirium, is too matter-of-fact for my personal taste. I find myself missing the participatory value of The Last Usable Hour, the mysterious open-ended cadences that transform my reading experience into something applicable. In short, we're told so much in this collection, but we aren't necessarily invited to conjure our own conclusions about what is said. Even so, I look forward to reading Landau's most recent collection,
  Soft Targets.
• 
  Brian Wasserman

  one of those books, that all i needed was a full minute to decide that it was bad
• 
  Monicaaa

  I find Deborah Landau brutally honest and direct. The poems in this flashed images in my head about the life of a woman, my own life, and made me feel things. It felt like a woman telling me parts of her life, but in a controlled way, like she was being honest, but wanted to say more, yet I knew what she meant. She didn't have to tell me details, because I knew what she meant.
  
  I can definitely see myself rereading parts of this collection, however it's in between a 4 and 5 star rating for me. While it evoked images and feelings in me, it wasn't perfect. Her strongest poems were in the first 3/4s of the collection, but the last part I think is still worth reading.
• 
  Milo R.

  (3.5)
  
  "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."
  - from "Mr and Mrs End of Suffering"
  
  
• 
  Lisa Lou

  I read this book as part of a reading challenge. I don't feel that I can fairly rate this book of poems since it is not really my main genre of interest. I'm sure they are beautiful and have deep meaning to those who enjoy and appreciate this genre.
• 
  Savanny Savath

  Too abstract at times. I couldn't connect with the poems on an emotional level. Not my cup of tea but the strongest section is "Late Summer."