In 1985, Barbara Hammer took to the subway with a simple question, “Would you like to meet your neighbor?” Looking like a serial killer in a mask made of transit maps, Hammer polled her audience: “Don’t you think it’s strange there could be 50 people on a subway car and nobody talks to each other?” “This is New York, isn’t it?” one rider replied. Forty years later—scrubbed but enduringly filthy—the subway is still a place for both elaborate spectacles and minding your own business. New York is, I guess, a place you aren’t allowed to gawk. Parrot on the subway? Dead body? Susan Sarandon? Just another day.

Fortunately, poets struggle with compulsory nonchalance. Susan Landers’s newest collection of poetry, What to Carry Into the Future (Roof Books, 2025), is a report of movement in and out of NYC’s transit lines, hubs, ports, vestibules, and vernaculars. Landers asks the reader to co-conspire in the illicit activity of noticing. Interrogating the ways transportation and nature and attention have been violated and commandeered by their governing systems, Landers’s poems strain over subways, sidewalks, and seaports to find a truer set of headlines. If we allow this landscape and its mediators to become monotonous, what do we lose? Landers has her notebook ready.

The book’s first section, “My Quotidian Icon,” is a long poem in one breath—a sprawling response to “How was your day?” that feels co-written by a communal CCTV. On a mission to ride every train line end-to-end, Landers captures the subway’s erratic and often addictive scenery, pulling in other riders, current events, landmarks, and the jobs and obligations that bring so many onboard. If one began to talk to Landers on the ride home, her truth-telling may be a little too Amy Goodman real for the 5pm commute. But the subway needs riders like Landers, those willing to disassemble its status as a divisive metaphor from the inside. Landers is a Straight-A student of the subterranean, a no-nonsense tour guide desiring a contemporary ethnography of regional eccentricities, both people and places. She has no time for “broken windows” theorizing or MTA shaming. She sees with great clarity the politicians and corporations responsible for destabilizing public transit and violently restricting movement and livability.

Almost shamefully—knowing too well how people injudiciously pine for the city—Landers admits that this poem is a love letter. But with the jagged charms of the place that inspired it, she writes: “I’ve always loved New York / because there’s always / someone somewhere / close enough / to hear you scream.” This is a love letter for bad breath, snoring, and infidelity. It’s a poem about learning to love the comfort of the too-close, the pleasures of the ceaseless and monotonous. Later, after considering the businessman’s love of the express train: “The local / is a habit / I don’t want / to break. / The local, / a deep lean. / It takes a minute / and gives one back.” Yes, the subway eventually makes sensuous, heart-eyed perverts of us all. As a container, a cross-section, a helper, a harasser, a total mess, and the only way to get around, it has both everything and nothing we could ever want. To love the subway is to love the city, to hold in precious tandem both its garbage and its flowers.

Landers keeps careful record of the real. Inequities litter the landscape—Barclays overtaking a subway stop and displacing thousands, Goldman Sachs towers aglow in a post-Sandy blackout thanks to public funds. Below ground, everything dissolves into itself—readers and riders unable to tell where anything starts and ends. But this is exactly what pulls Landers to write:

Landers refuses to let the hells of the world be read as random, inexplicable happenings. She mines for meaning and sorts her words carefully. The train car is a snapshot and a microcosm that allows for careful study of an impossibly hectic place. In a rare moment of static, a subway rider sees themself in relation to the whole city. The subway offers something concrete to remind a New Yorker of the grand, purposeful engineering at play in every part of New York—even as it might feel as natural as the ocean. All public transit pathways are painstakingly determined to corral and contain across socioeconomic and racial boundaries. So much of this book is about the breath that life and work in the city won’t give you and all the things you’ll never notice without it.

What to Carry Into the Future’s second act pops its head out of the subway to make sense of a different kind of transit path. “Sidewalk Naturalist” is a not-quite-joke about the unbelievably real nature that coexists amongst NYC’s manicured madness, narrated in ambulatory slow-mo. In the process of writing this book, Landers has become a scholar of local trees thanks, in part, to the NYC Parks Department Tree Map, which makes it possible to look up the species of each public tree in the city. Equipped with this knowledge, one might follow the trees’ lead:

Landers stalls in this idea of present as an aftermath, as all nature is in spite of. All of the contemporary moment—even its greenery—is pinched between past pain and impending total collapse. Once again, it’s the portal of light and the struggle to make sense of its momentary burst. “What is the habit, / the shape, / of this unthinkable simultaneity?” Landers asks of the too-many contradictions that wrangle themselves into a single canopy. We are nature, too, however perplexing and fucked. We join the clematis and the dogwoods as insufficient attempts at explaining the ways of this place.

The final section pairs poems with explanatory notes that feel like shockingly honest historical markers. They contain all the tour pamphlet would rather forget: encampments, predatory real estate schemes, comprehensive histories of accidental and purposeful sewage overflow. These waterways—in their pollution and exploitation and disarray—explain the city’s relationship to the natural world. As for the natural world, it has no explanation for the city: “The river, a murky throughline / from the world’s largest / stock exchange to its biggest / prison ship, cannot explain / how either continues to exist.” Of Jamaica Bay, Landers writes: “The paleoecologist Dorothy M. Peteet calls marshes archives for climate change. In the muck, a history of human decisions.” Like the subway, these pathways carry histories of violence—past and present—hidden in what seem to be natural inevitabilities. We can only uncover their accounts in patient and deliberate acts of noticing.

At Plumb Beach, Landers quotes the poet Mosab Abu Toha: “There is a duty that everyone should take on, that they need to write about what they see and feel. It can be about everything. About your dinner with family, your trips to the seashore, watching the sunset, etc. But let Gaza be part of it.” This sentiment of interlocked liberation is a guiding principle to so much of Landers’s thinking. This book never forgets that the train refuses entry to the most vulnerable, that the subways are overpoliced sites of profiling, that only people with certain physical abilities from certain neighborhoods can ride with ease. There is no part of this good or terrible earth—no part of the way we move through it—that does not find itself inextricably threaded to another, reaching deeper and pulling it close. Early in the book, Landers writes, “I’m drawing lines / to help me see / how I live in such a city.” There is no accident in urban design and where it corrals us—no accident in these links and tethers.

It’s been a little too long since someone showed us how to love this garbage-laden, piss-scented city—its toxic waterways, too-crowded subways, and busted sidewalks. Not since Frank O’Hara fooled a teenage me into visiting the awful, boring Frick has a poet gotten me off my ass so quickly in New York. Susan Landers is a revamped Rick Steves—decolonial, bisexual, lyrical. There is so much to learn from how she moves through and studies the city. I am ready to ride this tour bus until its wheels fall off.