In Great River Legs, Laura Madeline Wiseman measures the weeks in papers graded, classes taught, but also in miles ridden alongside rivers, lengths of the journey called “legs.” The book’s great subject is as much the making of narrative as it is an exploration of geography. Are our stories circular, spinning like wheels on a bicycle? Or do our lives move almost linearly like a waterway flowing across the land? Through small bursts of lyric prose, Wiseman explores the ways “we can begin again,” how we test ourselves on paths that are “steep and dangerous” while learning to accept that we can never “control the day’s rotation.”
—Jehanne Dubrow, author of throughsmoke: an essay in notes
