Susie DeFord’s poetry, film, and music connect Brooklyn, dogs, waterfront industry, photography, documentary attention, women’s stories, punk energy, urban change, and memory. She is a writer, filmmaker, musician, and educator whose poetry collection Dogs of Brooklyn developed from years of observing the city through the lives of dogs and the people around them. Her current creative practice also includes documentary and fiction film, music under the name NEON GRLZ, and community-focused filmmaking.
The archive preserves the title Diesel Ghosts, originally presented with photography by Dennis Riley. The two historical image files are absent from the current record, so the profile preserves their documented role and focuses on the surviving poem’s visual field: Red Hook, cranes, quiet water, rust, sailors, dogs, ducks, trolley lines, warehouses, plants, pie, old painted signs, tugboats, and the Statue of Liberty.
Diesel Ghosts
Diesel Ghosts treats Red Hook as a layered urban landscape where industrial history, animal life, commerce, memory, and redevelopment occupy the same waterfront. Cranes rise like animals, rusted machinery carries traces of vanished labor, and the harbor holds both contemporary traffic and older maritime ghosts.
The poem’s title gives machinery a spectral life. Diesel belongs to engines, trucks, ships, labor, fumes, and industrial movement. Ghosts belong to absence, memory, repetition, and the persistence of what has disappeared.
The site’s overview of modern poetry provides a broad frame for urban writing shaped by industry, architecture, public space, memory, animals, and the transformation of city neighborhoods.
Red Hook
Red Hook gives the poem a specific geography. Water, piers, warehouses, industrial structures, dogs, birds, old trolley lines, food businesses, painted signs, and distant civic monuments create a dense local field.
Place becomes legible through accumulation. The poem moves among large structures and small sensory details, allowing neighborhood identity to emerge through relation among materials.
The broader field of American poetry offers a useful context for contemporary writing that turns city streets, local history, labor, vernacular objects, and regional memory into literary form.
Photography by Dennis Riley
The historical presentation included two photographs by Dennis Riley. Their absence matters because the original work was designed as a relation between image and poem.
Photography gives urban poetry another structure of attention. A photograph selects a frame from the city, preserving one arrangement of light, object, distance, and human or animal presence. The poem can extend that frame through sound, memory, smell, movement, and association.
Christopher Mulrooney offers a neighboring route through poetry, photography, film criticism, and the way visual framing changes literary perception.
Industrial giraffes
The cranes in Diesel Ghosts become “industrial giraffes,” giving heavy infrastructure an animal body. The comparison changes scale and tone simultaneously.
A crane has height, long articulated structure, slow movement, and a visible relation to the horizon. Imagining it as a giraffe makes machinery feel alive while preserving its monumental presence.
This kind of metaphor is central to DeFord’s urban attention. City objects are read through creatures, bodies, memory, and visual resemblance.
Dogs and city life
Dogs appear naturally in Diesel Ghosts, and they became the central organizing presence of Dogs of Brooklyn. Dogs move through neighborhoods at human walking speed, creating repeated contact with streets, parks, stoops, strangers, weather, and local routines.
Writing through dogs gives the city a bodily scale. Smell, leash, water, play, waiting, territorial behavior, and companionship reveal aspects of urban life that a distant city view can miss.
Chuck Stebelton provides another route through contemporary poetry where animal observation, habitat, local movement, and sustained attention to place create a strong literary ecology.
Dogs of Brooklyn
Dogs of Brooklyn extends DeFord’s attention to dogs into a full collection. The book joins animal companionship with neighborhood portraiture, human relationships, humor, grief, everyday labor, and changing city life.
The title turns dogs into a way of reading Brooklyn. Each animal belongs to a human household and also to sidewalks, parks, buildings, routines, and social encounters.
The city therefore emerges through repeated relational scenes rather than through a single panoramic statement.
Waterfront industry
Red Hook’s waterfront carries warehouses, cranes, tugboats, rusted machinery, channels, old transit lines, and the memory of maritime labor. These materials give the poem an industrial texture.
Industrial landscapes often preserve earlier economic systems visibly. A warehouse can change function while keeping its brick walls; an old painted sign can outlive the business it advertised; a rail line can remain after regular use ends.
The poem reads these remnants as a form of urban memory.
Painted signs and memory
Old commercial lettering becomes one of the poem’s strongest historical details. A painted sign can survive for decades because pigment remains on brick after the surrounding economy changes.
Such signs create accidental archives. They preserve flavors, brands, businesses, typography, and earlier uses of buildings.
Adriana Grant offers a neighboring route through poetry where public language, visual composition, found text, signage, travel, and ordinary urban materials become formal resources.
Liberty and harbor
The distant Statue of Liberty brings national symbolism into the local waterfront. From Red Hook, the monument belongs to an active harbor of boats, industry, tourism, migration history, commerce, and weather.
DeFord’s imagery gives the familiar figure a volatile edge by imagining the torch as potential flame. Civic icon and urban danger briefly occupy the same image.
This keeps the harbor from becoming picturesque. History and symbolism remain active inside material city life.
Film and documentary attention
DeFord’s later work as a filmmaker extends the visual intelligence already present in her poetry. Documentary practice depends on framing, listening, editing, duration, voice, evidence, and ethical relation to the people being represented.
Her films focus especially on stories of underrepresented people, including women whose lives have received limited public attention. This gives documentary attention a social purpose.
Dana Teen Lomax offers another route through poetry, documentary form, film, editing, public record, and the use of artistic practice to preserve social experience.
You Can’t Take Her Out
DeFord directed the documentary short You Can’t Take Her Out, centered on Cuban American artist Sita Gomez. The project continues her interest in people, place, image, memory, and overlooked creative histories.
A documentary portrait shares important qualities with a poem about a neighborhood. Both depend on selection and attention. The artist decides which details enter the frame and how sequence creates relation among them.
The result can preserve a life or place through carefully arranged fragments.
Music and NEON GRLZ
DeFord’s music under the name NEON GRLZ adds sound, performance, and punk energy to her cross-media practice. Music changes literary attention through beat, volume, repetition, electronic texture, lyric voice, and bodily performance.
Punk also brings a tradition of directness, self-production, community scenes, and low-budget invention. These qualities align with DeFord’s interest in accessible filmmaking and independent creative practice.
Lindsey Boldt offers a neighboring route through poetry, music, performance, theatrical form, small presses, and community-based artistic work.
Women and later life
DeFord’s recent film work often centers women over forty and the cultural stories surrounding aging, transition, artistic recognition, housing, identity, and second beginnings.
This focus broadens the social field of her earlier poetry. Urban observation becomes connected with whose stories receive a frame and whose lives remain overlooked.
The creative act becomes a form of sustained attention to lives that mass culture frequently compresses or ignores.
Community filmmaking
DeFord also teaches and mentors low-budget filmmaking, including smartphone production. This work treats technical access as part of storytelling culture.
A camera that people already carry can become a tool for documentary, fiction, music video, testimony, and local history.
The method fits a creative practice built from everyday observation: artistic work begins with close attention to the world immediately available.
Reading Susie DeFord
DeFord’s literary identity emerges through Brooklyn, dogs, waterfront industry, photography, film, music, women’s stories, punk energy, documentary attention, and the persistence of urban memory.
Within contemporary poetry, DeFord represents a cross-media American practice where poem, photograph, film, song, and neighborhood observation belong to one larger art of witnessing place and people.
The strongest route into DeFord is to follow what remains visible after change. Notice rusted machinery, painted signs, dogs moving through streets, missing photographs, old warehouses, overlooked artists, and neighborhoods carrying several histories at once. Her work turns attention into an archive of living detail.