Walking Wheel

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.

Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie’s baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple’s first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.

Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

Walking Wheel is a book of simplicity and history, of landscape, weather, and hearth, where goats are milked, nails forged, trees felled, and two young people learn by daily practice that the true measure of wealth is love.

Advanced Praise

“This is a story we may have thought familiar, following a young homesteading couple through the first year of their marriage. But told with the intensity and rhythms of poetry, this familiar story becomes something altogether fresh—a place and time and way of being that, despite the distance from us, feels alive to its very bones. In these few lines, Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”
— Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek

“This splendid book-length series of poems finds Molly Fisk at the height of her powers.  Here history enters poetry, and Fisk’s sensuous act of memorialization reveals the lives of two young settlers through their silent communication, from their courtship to their first child.  Cooking, canning, lovemaking, and sheer sweat. Illness and injury. Forests, horses, rain.  Fisk balances the rich, forward motion of a page-turner with still moments of lyrical wonder, making Walking Wheel a grand achievement.”
— Molly Peacock, author of The Widow’s Crayon Box