by Isaac Randel
April 7, 2026
Walking Wheel by Molly Fisk; Red Hen Press; 160 pages; $18.95
Jorge Luis Borges warned his generation against the temptation of sprinkling “local colour” into their compositions, pointing to the Quran as a prooftext: for a book composed entirely in the Arabian desert, it had a surprising dearth of camels. “Mohammed,” Borges wrote, “as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them.” Borges’s observation presents a challenge for all writers of history: how can we capture the textures of past worlds without, at the same time, becoming accidentally anachronistic by focusing our attention in the “wrong places?”
Molly Fisk takes up the challenge with Walking Wheel, a narrative suite from the decorated California poet which functions as a novel-in-verse. Set in the frontier country of the California-Oregon border in 1875, the collection offers a tender and understated portrait of a marriage in its first bloom. Miles and Phoebe Imlay, newlyweds from Oregon who have known one another since childhood, set off on a weeks-long journey to the sparsely settled Californian hinterland, where Miles has built a house from which they aim to start their new life. The days are long, and the action is slow: isolated from their families, dependent upon each other for their sole comforts even as they struggle to communicate, Miles and Phoebe stutter and stumble their way into routines that help protect their sanity from the aching loneliness of the open country: townsfolk are polite enough but also suspicious, as Phoebe finds herself stalked and ogled by a repellant neighbor. Then Miles enlists a teen handyman, Tom, to help him build a barn at breakneck speed before winter sets in, and his constant exhaustion further chafes his already-strained communication with Phoebe. But these conflicts narrow when Phoebe becomes pregnant: the couples’ back-and-forths become more playful, more touching, more sincere. Phoebe’s sisters arrive to act as midwives just in time; the baby arrives healthy; hope for a future is cemented.
Walking Wheel captures a range of American folkways that are irretrievably lost to time. Miles’s and Phoebe’s lives involve a now-unfathomable degree of craftsmanship and artistry at every level of daily life: not only in cooking, hunting, and homebuilding, but even in the unceremonious graces of cleaning, bathing, mending, tying, and stacking cord wood. Everything about life on the frontier is brutal, hardscrabble, isolated, and subject to nature’s caprice. And yet, it is just this scale of difficulty (bordering on tedium) that makes mere survival into a kind of art form.
Walking Wheel boasts a Borgesian “surfeit” of details about daily life which, in the characters’ own era, would have gone entirely unremarked. The American poetry of 1875 reserved very little space for the quotidian material that makes up this collection, so it is precisely the details of these unglamorous tasks which Fisk aims to preserve. And these moments of historical reclamation are among the collection’s strongest, scaling well with Fisk’s mastery of the intimate lyric mode. Such pastoral scenes, set on the Imlays’ farmstead, almost always serve as occasions for a character’s personal revelation, as with the closing lines of “Milking,” where Phoebe absorbs the soundscapes of her barn as Miles hammers an anvil in the background:
“The chorus of home,
she thinks, with a little descant bleat
or two and the odd snuffle and flap
when one of the mules lips his hay
or a cluck from a laying hen.
Sometimes I don’t know how
I could be lonely.”
When the action is small, as it is here, Fisk’s musicality sparkles through, with lines breaks redolent of some of James Wright’s best lyric turns. But the action in Walking Wheel often widens and quickens in order to keep the narrative moving apace. Miles and Phoebe cover much (literal and figurative) ground, discuss major life changes, have dramatic near-misses and suffer from dramatic swings of fortune like fevers and coyote attacks. At moments like these, the collection sacrifices the tight, subtle line structure of its quieter moments for the cogency and novelistic pace of its larger narrative. Individual poems vacillate between intensely musical meditations or character-centered vignettes; though not always consistent, the mixture makes for a balanced storytelling experience.
The heart of Walking Wheel is with its characters. Phoebe is precocious but too frequently nervous. Miles is an awkward romantic, disciplined but often oblivious. Thrust into a new land and a new marriage, both quickly realize their absolute vulnerability in the face of their circumstances, and both develop a mutual language of humor, affection, and even erotic companionship. Walking Wheel charts the blossoming of a shy courtship into a state of real emotional maturity which reads as authentic, and – for many readers in the 21st century – perhaps even a touch exotic.
Walking Wheel is nostalgic - its frontier romanticism, and the tender love story at its center, offer a vision of a more robust, and more rooted, existence in the not very distant past. It is impossible to read Walking Wheel without a pinch of longing for the world Fisk creates. But it is a nostalgia rendered so maturely, with such fidelity to the layered and grimy textures of lived history, and with such an honest concentration on the quiet heroisms of daily life, that Walking Wheel turns the reader with renewed vigilance toward the unsung elements of their own world.
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"The Chorus of Home": Nostalgia, Remembrance, and the Forward Gaze in Molly Fisk’s Walking Wheel
POETRY REVIEW
Image by JP Valery from Unsplash
Isaac Randel earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School. He is an adjunct instructor of English at Mercy University and teaches English at Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, New York. He currently serves as an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review.
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