An Apparently Impossible Adventure
Cover Art by Susan Jamison
An Apparently Impossible Adventure is truly an adventure in verse: mystical,specific, and engaging. I am drawn to the imagery, the sounds, and the desire for relief from daily struggles and life-changing obstacles. This collection has much to offer readers as we journey with our own families, communities, and country.
– Up the Staircase
Praise for An Apparently Impossible Adventure
Adventure Stefano
Laura Madeline Wiseman’s prose is razor-sharp, cutting through all the falsities we cling to, exposing us all hiding beneath the masks we wear, exposing our wounds, our wandering frailties, all that we sidestep, and most deeply, exposing the ‘mists that divide.’ An Apparently Impossible Adventure is a stunning read. – Karen Stefano
Adventure Hibbard
In deft turns, Wiseman travels multiple geographies – the world of myth and true fairy tales, the underworld of sketchy hotel rooms and desire, the natural landscape that enchants and confounds, the worlds of want and need and love and loss. Her voice by turns gritty and warm, edgy and elegiac, Wiseman expertly weaves a tale of obsession with the girlish femininity of fairies within the larger story of how women must become shape shifters to navigate the terrain of relationship to the self and to the world. By the book’s end, we have emerged from the underworld, the threads of relationship rewoven, restored but deeply changed by the journey. – Kate Lynn Hibbard
Adventure Kay
Fairies are sinister creatures, seductive and cruel, as is Laura Madeline Wiseman’s newest collection, An Apparently Impossible Adventure. With her sharp wit and insightful eye, Wiseman takes us on a journey through American consumerism and its numbing dollar store obsessions, across landscapes both lost and rediscovered, into the heart of a marriage tested and torn. In this fine and finely-wrought collection, Wiseman lifts the veils that divide us and incants the magics that bring us together again. – Liz Kay
Adventure Schmitz
In this book Laura Madeline Wiseman fashions a complex weaving of the inner world and modern relationship difficulties presented in an archetypal retelling of classical hero myth. Are the fairies real? Clearly they represent ego manifestations and the interplay of jinn plane and earthly travail. Whether lost in the fairy forest (illusion or reality?), arguing with lover or caring for motherless nieces the reader will travel along a deep journey of the self and other in today’s America. – Barbara Schmitz
Adventure Agodon
In this world, fantasy juxtaposes reality: fairies and illness, American Gothic and married life, pirates and popcorn. Yet throughout these poems, Wiseman charms us with the specific and the real—whether a mandrake seed unfurls the first white tongue or our heroes that drove without seatbelts, we travel through her world of relationships—both natural and mystical. In grief and beauty, Wiseman’s well-crafted, engaging poems consider the deeper tales we’ve been given—“a promise of packaged life, Just enough magic to cup in your hands”—in a book you will return to again and again. – Kelli Russell Agodon
Related Links
- Radio The Wimmin’s Show KZUM
- KMSU Weekly Reader
- Blog interview Chris Rice Cooper
- Interview Talk with Me
- Review Up the Staircase
- District Lit 2015 Poetry Prize Finalist
Sample Poems
- Abyss & Apex
- Queen Mob’s Teahouse
- Silver of Stone
- The Fem
- Canary
- Gingerbread House
- Verse Writes
- Circe's Lament (Accents Publishing)
- Out of the Depths (Holy Cow! Press)
- Bearers of Distance (Eastern Point Lit House & Press)