A review by jmarkwindy
The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau

3.0

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.