Fisk’s novel in verse offers a pastoral meditation on American frontier life that explores domesticity, self-discovery, and nature. Newlyweds and aspiring homesteaders Phoebe and Miles Imlay travel for 23 days from Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley to start their life together. The novel, set in the late 19th century, unfolds in a series of brief, linear poetic vignettes, often only a page or two in length, that trace the couple’s physical journey and their gradual shaping of a shared existence.