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
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