Who knew bicycles have inner lives? Or that 10 American writers, from Twain to Miller, had relationships with bikes? Or, even, who knows—What the heck’s a Velocipede? From the invocation of “Cyclist,” a poem that gives you the unquestionable sense of having stumbled into Satori somewhere inside the layers of a bicyclist’s energy bar made of spiritual instruction and a profound meshing of the human body to a machine— Laura Madeline Wiseman knows, and reveals all, as in her “midnight delirium,” in “Wants and Needs.” Velocipede is little squares and rectangles of words, selfies from every stop on every bike, from Big Wheel pony-tailed gang membership, to biking through the annealing metamorphosis into becoming ordinary gods, “wafting patchouli, bodies sun-bronzed” in “Landing Town.” Wow! What a ride!
– Greg Kosmicki
