“What gal wouldn’t set fire to the shoulder/along the road to mark her path, asking, Follow?” Wiseman entreats. As the female speaker journeys across the states on her bicycle, we experience her immediate and meticulous gaze. These poems manifest as a log of both gratitude and chance, and a catalog of questions that beg us to enter adventure as a philosophy rather than a status-building hobby. As natural as the observation of a scavenger, Wiseman can at once search for meaning but without expectation. Her perseverance is calm, her uncertainty tempered, and we are invited to enter this sense of balance ourselves, “Aren’t most things like this—lonely/climbs among others with better kit, wheels,/bodies, class, birth, that privilege of air.” In the solitude of these poems, there is also the bedrock aspiration for connecting through the knowledge and roads that lead us to one another.
—Kristi Carter, author of Cosmovore
