Desire Path

Author: Taryn Hubbard

Publisher: Talonbooks (2020)

A debut poetry collection that grows from the impulse to explore home in the suburb––in the intersections, overlaps, and gaps between urban and rural. These are walking poems and driving poems. In growing suburbs across the country, there is a push to urbanize, to rethink this sprawling space; urban renewal is foreshadowed all over contemporary suburbs, where vacant single-family lots herald anticipation of redevelopment into something more, something better, something healthier. But before that happens, what do we make of the space as it sits, just as it is? What monuments anchor the suburb now? These poems call on superblocks, gas stations, fast food joints, flickering flat screen TVs, six-lane highways, and wildfire smoke to guide the experience of moving through the complicated markers from childhood to motherhood.