Journey to Nowhere by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s astonishing new full-length collection, Journey to Nowhere, is a meditation on hunger, both physical and mental. She skillfully weaves prose poems and lyrics together in this collection to accomplish what poets have been doing since the beginning of language and Whitman so aptly described. This is appropriate because Wiseman is, like Whitman, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul.” These poems encompass a vast physical and emotional terrain—a childhood of poverty waiting for welfare checks and food stamps, cockroaches crawling in the kitchen, reading feminist texts in college, details of practicing yoga, long bicycle trips, navigating complicated relationships, parental divorce, and political resistance. She never allows us to forget that the stakes are high in these poems. Hunger exists at the center of the collection and holds each section together. “It was all…initials and promises—our symbols that meant hunger was life.” Wiseman artfully shows us the way our individual and collective hunger can both harm and save us. The urgency of this collection, with its political and cultural commentary, is palpable. In her previous collections, Wiseman has already shown that she has a fierce voice. This collection proves that she is a force to be reckoned with in contemporary poetry.

–Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift

These poems comprise not a book but an experience to be savored.  In Journey to Nowhere, a story unfolds as deftly rendered as it is delicately layered. With lyrical and story-telling style, Laura Madeline Wiseman shifts a life of poverty, hunger, and lack into proper fuel to feed the warrior, sweeping the reader along in a regimen of yoga and cycling to rebuild. Toward the end of the book in “Corpse” a yogi instructs her students to transform their hearts while focusing on the mantra, “May we be safe. May we forgive. May we be at peace.”  The fictional character Rocky Balboa famously advised that it isn’t about how hard you can hit, but how you can move forward no matter how hard you have been hit, but Wiseman offers something more.  As a reader you’ll cheer for the athlete and the warrior, but this poet teaches us to cheer for forgiveness and the nurturing of self, too, because only then can the seeds of transformation grow.

–Collen Wells, author of Dinner with Doppelgangers

Poets are wanderers and wonder-makers at heart. In Journey to Nowhere, Laura Madeline Wiseman takes the reader on a simultaneously transcendent and embodied journey through poverty, yoga poses and philosophy, and to islands yet to be named. She writes, “Our aim is to be great, to become half something else,” and through these poems we find magic, alchemy, desire, both hers and ours, unfold as the greatness of the self is revealed.

–Carly Sachs, author of the why and later and Yamas and Niyamas

Laura Madeline Wiseman refabricates spaces natural, manmade, and mystical, voice urgent, unrelenting. Vital lines, fragmentation, and shifting form call upon readers to consider submission and redemption, to reimagine “warrior,” to see and re-see “nowhere.” To read Journey to Nowhere is to relearn breath and touch.

–Janine Harrison, author of If We Were Birds

There’s always movement afoot in Laura Madeline Wiseman’s words. Even when a speaker in a poem seems stuck, longing for the next thing or repainting a scene from way back when. In body and mind, Madeline takes you on these journeys, however mournful or hopeful, landing you softly somewhere, grateful for the ride.

–William Meiners, editor of Sport Literate

Poetry, quietly provocative, implores us to reach beyond logic to the illusive emotional intelligence. Journey to Nowhere transports us to where the reality of life and the creative mind interconnect. Through profound telling, Laura Madeline Wiseman generously shares the intimacies and truths of life’s twists and turns, welcoming us as guests, rather than as voyeurs. Poetry adept? Or poetry novice? Both will be inspired by this book, as I am.

–Nischala Joy Devi, author of The Healing Path of Yoga and The Secret Power of Yoga