Susan Landers, What To Carry Into the Future

 

It’s common in dystopias for people to go underground to survive after all possibilities on the surface have been exhausted. To go underground is to separate oneself from the most basic indicators of direction and time. Without stars or the sun, any natural sense of direction or time is lost.

From their very beginning, the trains offered New Yorkers a new way to live. (“My Quotidian Icon”)

I’m fascinated by how Brooklyn poet Susan Landers approaches poetry collections as cultural and historical mapping projects, from her Franklinstein (Roof Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], a collection subtitled “Or, the making of a modern neighborhood” and described as a “hybrid genre collection of poetry and prose [that] tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown,” to her latest, What To Carry Into the Future (New York NY: Roof Books, 2025). As the press release to this new collection offers, What To Carry Into the Future is “a poetic exploration that cultivates an anarchic desire to ride the entire [New York subway] system, not to commute, or to travel directly from point A to point B, but to approach the subway map as an artist and a passenger.”

What To Carry Into the Future uses transportation and location as a metaphor and a conduit to explore beleaguered social relationships and standards that are challenged by political and natural forces. When we look for a city’s infrastructure, where do we find it, what do we see, and what does it tell us about how we’re living?

Constructed through three extended poem-sections—“My Quotidian Icon,” “Sidewalk Naturalist” (recently produced as a chapbook through above/ground press) and “Water Finds a Way”—each section also includes a date and geographic stamp at the offset: “New York City, 2017-2018,” “Brooklyn, 2022” and “New York City, 2023-2024.” “I’m drawing lines / to help me see,” she writes, as part of the opening poem-section, “how I live in such a city.” If Franklinstein wrote out Landers’ roots, What To Carry Into the Future writes of where she has chosen to land, weaving through the spaces and traces of geography, history, currency, chaos and gesture. “This may be / a love letter.” Landers writes, “This may be my vows.” A few lines further: “You always win, / New York. / You always get / whatever you want. / But I can still lay / tracks inside you, / reinscribe in lines / the old names / we have for each other— / Atlantic, Pacific— / how the maiden names stick, / familiar as an ocean, / along the elevated track.”

Curiously, the first two sections also begin with short introductory notes, whereas the third and final section includes a sequence of paired notes and poems, almost as a sequence of call-and-response pairings, fifteen sets with subject-titles such as “Atlantic Ocean,” “Gowanus Canal,” “Coney Island Creek,” “Spuyten Duyvil Creek” and “Harlem River.” Throughout the collection, Landers moves through the underground of city as she writes of history, landmarks and landscapes, water systems, death, an unsolved murder, floods in Texas, capitalism, seasons and Columbus, offering threads on what remains and what holds, the seen, unseen and buried, what had been and should not be forgotten. “Line by line // to build such // tender thoughts.” she offers, as part of the second poem-section, “To know that I’m home. // Like, // really, // even in the gravity of it all.” However rebuilt or overbuilt, history is held in place through place, which itself remains as memory. “Every day // we choose // what to carry // into the future.” she writes, to end the second section, a sequence of poem-fragments that accumulate along a slow and steady path, “Today, // there are seed pods // on the honey locust. /// And look, // that one // there— // —it has thorns.” Or, as the second part of the paired “Spuyten Duyvil Creek” writes:

Where the devil spews a current
and the crow caws under the high-rise
past the swing bridge where the train
horns blow and the osprey hunts
on the rocky promontory inside the glacial
potholes where marble lies beneath the schist
above a witch hazel understory between
the ridges in the wading place beside
the cove and the night heron’s mudflat
near the scullers the recovered marsh
the place of the reeds the flooded path
the glistening place where I saw that rat
and the sandpiper released its metallic spink
at the tip of the island on my day off.