Category Archives: carry_praise

“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…

One expects this long bicycle ride to be bumpy, the trek strenuous, but this poetic journal is smooth, comforting even. These poems are spare and focused: plucked from the side of the road, captured while bicycling across America. Laura Madeline Wiseman reminds us that “when we search, we search alone,” but her poems show us…

Part postcard home, part visitors’ guide, part People’s History of the United States, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s poems split open America with an observer’s care. A bicyclist rides the open road with no windshield, and this chronicler pockets lists of lost objects, animals, weathers, geologies, customs, body pains, and the mind’s relentless thoughts. Wiseman has a…

“The road is empty and there’s so much here.” With its biting flies, granny gears, and a proliferation of mysterious spoons, Laura Madeline Wiseman’s What a Bicycle Can Carry is at turns fiercely melancholic and playful, a generous meditation on the intersection of self and place that stitches one moment/image/sensation to the next. Wiseman’s chronicle…