What A Bicycle Can Carry by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s What a Bicycle Can Carry shows the beauty that can be made by attending to what’s been disregarded, overlooked, and cast off. Though the structure of the book – a trek across America by bicycle, with sections giving the names of states and poems defined by the day of the trip and the miles covered – may seem straightforward, the book probes a deeper interior journey. One poem, which finds the cyclist-speaker perched briefly at a pull-in in Colorado, trying to catch her breath in the thin mountain air, leaps from the specifics of the journey to bigger questions about identity, asking “Aren’t most things like this – lovely / climbs among others with better kit, wheels/ bodies, class, birth, that privilege of air.” This book examines, with Wiseman’s keen eye for detail and precise turns of phrase, both the tiny particulars of the journey – the bicycle toolkit, discarded scrunchies and other roadside detritus, the rest stops which alternate between luxurious and horrifying – and the broad cultural issues of who belongs in this land and how we occupy it. In a moment when our nation feels divided and strange, Wiseman’s authoritative, sensitive guide provides a bicycle-eye view of a beautiful, complicated country.

—Nancy Reddy, author of Acadiana

“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

Laura Madeline Wiseman teaches writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her book Drink (BlazeVox [ books ]) won the 2016 Independent Publisher Bronze Book Award for poetry. Her book Velocipede was selected as a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist for Sports. Her collaborative books with artist Sally Deskins, Intimates and Fools and Leaves of Absence, were Honor Books for the Nebraska Book Award. Her latest book is A Bicycle’s Echo (Red Dashboard).<,p>

Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Margie, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Arts & Letters, Prairie Schooner, Feminist Studies, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Calyx, Sport Literate, Boneshaker Magazine, Adventure Cycling blog, and American Short Fiction. She earned a B.S. in Women’s Studies and English Literature from Iowa State University, an M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D. in English the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has received an Academy of American Poets Award, a Louise Van Sickle Fellowship, the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship, the Mari Sandoz/Prairie Schooner Award, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and grants from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Center for the Great Plains Studies. Her work has twice been nominated for the Elgin Award, received an honorable mention for the Pacifica Literary Review’s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Contest Award, was a finalist for the 2015 District Lit Poetry Prize and the 41st New Millennium Writings 2016 Literary Award for Nonfiction, and won the 2015 Beecher’s Award in Poetry.

She edited two poetry anthologies Bared: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2017) and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013), served as the Guest Editor for Issue #18 – Historical (Re)Tell of Cahoodaloodaling, and is the Editor of The Chapbook Interview

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-328-7