WALKING WHEEL

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. The text addresses the Imlays’ literal and emotional journey and the changing but constant cycle of life—a walking wheel. The work focuses more deeply on Phoebe’s perspective and romanticizes traditional gender roles and the traditional dream of the West. Her character’s interiority, expressed in luminous lines, situates self-discovery in repetition, routine, and mindfulness. Most passages are concerned with simple, everyday themes—wonder, love, nature, and the beauty of oneness—as daily labor, seasonal change, and marital intimacy fold into a single, continuous experience of becoming. Although the characters face hardships—preparing for winter, defending livestock against predators, overcoming sickness—the lyricism of the text transforms the stark realities of frontier life in a one-room cabin with unglassed windows and an outhouse. 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.

A romantic portrait of intimacy and life at the edge of expansion.