“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

“Molly Fisk’s beautifully crafted collection, Walking Wheel: Linked Poems, is a sensuous, mesmerizing narrative of two newlywed pioneers in the California foothills, from their wedding day to the birth of their first child. The slim volume contains 99 poems that read like a traditional homesteading saga—from crossing rivers and climbing trails to building a barn with neighbors—but with psalm-like grace and reverence for the details of once-virgin California. As a narrative, the story is page-turning, gripping; as poetry, the lines are sensuous, attentive, gritty, and engrossing. Focused on the daily work that made a wilderness into a home, Fisk’s precise ear for dialogue, cadence, and authentic language lifts this collection. Walking Wheel is a stunner to reread, read aloud, and share.”

—Julia Park Tracey, Alameda Poet Laureate Emerita, Amaryllis: Collected Poems