Walking Wheel: Novel-In-Verse (Hardcover)
$36.95
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$36.95
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Red Hen Press
Walking Wheel: Novel-In-Verse (Hardcover)
$36.95
Sale price
$36.95
Regular price
Ready to ship in 3 - 5 days
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.
"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
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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.
Book Details
- Publisher:
- Red Hen Press
- ISBN:
- 9781636284613
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Pages:
- 160
- Authors:
- Molly Fisk
- Published Date:
- 2026-04-07
- Language:
- English
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About Molly Fisk
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Molly Fisk's Walking Wheel caught my attention at the Red Hen booth at AWP, in part because there aren't many novel-in-verse written for adults (it seems more prevalent in MG and YA). This week, I finally got around to reading it and I'm happy to report Walking Wheel is a page turner. These narrative poems are beautifully crafted and tell the story seamlessly of Phoebe and Miles, a homesteading couple in their first year, starting with marriage, the journey west, and then life setting into their new home in Cedarville, CA. With so much terrible news in the world today, this book delivered a sacred escape into a slower paced, nature-filled world, where the stakes are high for survival. At times innocent, at other moments steamy, Phoebe and Miles fascinate at every turn with their observations of each other and the landscape. It's a tender book and a good reminder that we need—now more than ever—to be reminded that we're part of nature, that helping neighbors should be a given. And, that there's worth in doing something slow, meaningful, and with precision, like the writing of this book itself. It took Fisk 25 years to complete Walking Wheel. Somehow, I feel it came out at a time when we need it most.