WHAT TO CARRY INTO THE FURURE
by Susan Landers
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?
Landers’ investigatory poetics teases a mystical tour guide mentality that recalls the gonzo historian Speed Levitch. Her humanistic optimism for the possibilities of community shaping neighborhoods contrasts with interests of greedy developers and relates to the sociological work of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Landers’ book is a poetic exploration that cultivates an anarchic desire to ride the entire 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. Landers’ MTA is much more than a dysfunctional, violent, and dirty hole in the ground. It is the arterial network we rely on to move. Set within New York City’s subways, streets, and waterways, What to Carry into the Future explores the importance of resilience as a bulwark against collapse.
Praise for What To Carry Into the Future by Susan Landers
From the Bronx to Coney Island, through everyday joys and catastrophes, Sue Landers travels the subways, sidewalks, and waterways of the city to deliver an expansive vision of New York in its many voices and reveries. A lovely companion for your next commute or meditative stroll.
-Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York and Feral City
What to do in the aftermath of one crisis, while witnessing another in slow motion, and bracing for yet another? In her “quiet choices of living,” Landers gifts readers with incandescent poems that illuminate New York City. At first glance, the book reads like a masterful collection of concrete observations and matter-of-fact genealogies of power. But it quickly reveals itself to serve, too, as an incisive, reflexive series of meditations on ways of knowing, and thus, living with meaning against the seduction of nihilistic despair. Each of the book’s three sections is a masterful rendering of the landscapes it habits—with short, propulsive lines swaying the reader down subway train tracks, clusters of lines like blades of grass pop-ping up through cracks in the sidewalks, and a combination of flowing prose and capacious sonnets with the authority of water. The poems do more than flout facile binaries of the urban and the pastoral, blight and life; they provide a polyphonic ode to place as more-than-human life. Landers simultaneously dwells in this political moment and transcends it, inviting readers to grieve with her for those dying and the earth and ourselves— to engage in the act of witness, of attention, and to take one more step, and then another.
-Celina Su, Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
The social ecologies vibrantly documented by this “sidewalk naturalist” constitute a 21st-century paean to place, a valediction of the local in spite of what we do to it. “Our normal / is trash,” these field notes read, yet “This may be a love letter, / these may be my vows.” Modeling an ethics of attention that offers an alternative to and respite from capitalism’s unequal, unjust, Earth-destroying logics, Landers opts for repair as resistance, the only way of furthering our shared world: “precarious, resilient, unfurling.”
-Brian Teare, 2020 Guggenheim Fellow
Sue Landers’ virtuosic new book merges personal reflection, micro history, instruction, field notes, and dérive to re-invent the City and Subway Poem for our post (post) Covid moment. In three suites of undulating poetry and prose, What to Carry into the Future guides the reader through aftermaths of New York City entanglements with war, revolution, white supremacy, and corporate American values. What to carry into the future? The reader would do well to start with this pioneering, dazzlingly bravura work.
-Paolo Javier, former Queens Borough Poet Laureate
About the Author
Susan (Sue) Landers (she/her) is the author of Franklinstein (Roof Books, 2016), a multi-genre collection about a Philadelphia neighborhood wrestling with the impact of organized abandonment. She is also the author of 248 mgs., a panic picnic (O Books, 2003) and Covers (O Books, 2007). Her chapbooks include 15: A Poetic Engagement with the Chicago Manual of Style (Least Weasel, 2011) and What I Was Tweeting While You Were On Facebook (Perfect Lovers Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, and elsewhere. She was the founding editor of the experimental poetry journal POM2. She was a 2018 artist in residence at PLAYA Summer Lake and a 2015 resident fellow at Saltonstall Colony for the Arts. She has BA from the University of Michigan where she won a Hopwood and an MFA from George Mason University. She is a former executive director of Lambda Literary and lives in Brooklyn.