There is violence in a bloom. From either a fresh bursting flower or the smoke plume from a bomb there is birth, beauty, and barbarity. Landau writes “bring me a souvenir from the desecrated city,/ something tender, something that might bloom” (“don’t blame the wisteria”). Ending Soft Targets with the word bloom, Deborah Landau sums up in one word the main theme of her book: great violence pervades our current age but in this shadow of fear the world can find beauty in the softness and vulnerability of everyday life. Landau’s poems do more than simply point to the reasons for today’s fears; the reader can take away hope rather than simply angst and anger.

By connecting violent events from all over the world, Landau creates a sense of community with mankind—we have all seen tragedies, we can understand each other’s fear. From Paris to Frankfurt, to New York, she describes the subtle horror of living in an age where being a soft target is inescapable for the ordinary person. Through word choice and rhythm, a tone of righteous anger breaks from the pages and into the readers’ hearts. This anger is something that lives inside all of us, and Landau communicates it. In her American poem, the words cut like sharp ice.

And now they sit at the head of our table,
can we be excused?
Scurrilous scumbags, X-rays of greed, they move themselves
up the flagpole, razing the trees.

                                                            (“America wants it soft”)

Contrasting her dark tone, spots of subtle beauty break through like sunlight past the canopy of a darkened forest. In her poem "into the sheets we slipped, a crisis," Landau writes "snow petals down a lace of white flowers/ and our baby sleeps in her indigo crib." The gentle and elegant imagery describing the scene surrounding the baby show that despite having produced a soft target, it was a wonder worth making and protecting. In the bloom of bombshells and bullets, there wakes the bloom of a birth—something beautiful to be celebrated despite the current circumstances of the world. Furthermore, throughout the book there lies an undertone of sensuality; sometimes a direct counterpoint to violence, sometimes oddly entwining with it. For example, Landau intersperses her poems with allusions to Eros, the Greek god of love. It is almost as if, in the hunger for life, the lines between violence and sensuality blur.

In the end, Deborah Landau's Soft Targets blooms devoid of the fear to speak towards the social climate of the world today. Anger, beauty, violence, and elegance all join hands in these poems to communicate what it means to be a soft target in today’s world. A reader can feel the pain and anger with the speaker, but what makes the poems powerful is their inability to give in to such rage. While the world is vengeful it must remember that there is still hope, still happiness, still love; “much trouble at hand, yet the lilies still” (“there were real officers in the streets (Paris)”).