Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
“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
Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, and devotion shape the story of home.
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.
"A triumph of the text is how it brings 'separate understandings / to work together' and 'spins and thinks of circles' in order to relate personal discovery with the rhythms of the natural world. As tracks, cycles, and rhythms converge, the text quietly complicates the ethos of frontier expansion, even as it indulges a more straightforward sense of progress; it’s a pattern of tracks that’s briefly broken by a single bootheel among 'some late-blooming Indian paintbrush' on the far side of the creek that runs through the Imlays’ property—a quiet nod to the forced displacement of Native Americans."
—Kirkus Review
“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
"A sensuous, mesmerizing narrative of two newlywed pioneers in the California foothills . . . the story is page-turning, gripping; as poetry, the lines are sensuous, attentive, gritty, and engrossing. . . . a stunner to reread, read aloud, and share."
—Julia Park Tracey, Alameda Poet Laureate Emerita, Amaryllis: Collected Poems
Molly Fisk is the author of the poetry collections The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter (#4 in the California Poetry Series), Terrain (coauthor), and Salt Water Poems (letterpress), as well as five collections of radio commentary. She's the Inaugural Poet Laureate Emerita of Nevada County, California, where she edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She lives in Nevada City, California.