<DIV><p>"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</p><p>"Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure, desire, limitation, and, ultimately, disappearance."?Mark Doty</p><p>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.</p><p><I>blame the egg blame the fractured stones<BR>at the bottom of the mind</I></p><p><I>blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug<BR>the bulky king of trudge and stein</I></p><p><I>how I love a masculine in my parlor<BR>his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums</I></p><p><I>in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking<BR>I am the heavy hollow snared</I></p><p><I>the days are spring the days are summer<BR>the days are nothing and not dead yet</I></p><p><B>Deborah Landau</B> 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.</p></DIV>