Deborah Landau (born 1973) is an American poet, essayist, and critic. Landau's "taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions" have been described as "confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg." Her meditations upon yearning and selfhood are said to remind us "of the nuanced beauty of language." Jennifer Michael Hecht has praised her poems as "Terrificly smart, witty, and slightly terrifying." Nick DePascal asserts that Landau's work "accurately matches form to content" and "leads the reader down a particular path through style as much as the meaning of the actual words on the page...." Publishers Weekly has described her work as "haunting," "stunning," "dark, urgent, sexy, deeply sad, and, above all, powerful."