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.
Published September 2020 by Talonbooks.
In the morning I wake
from “Win”
and think casinos. It’s the
promise of luck that
sandblasts the sighs
straight from our guts,
the idea of easy.
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Reviews
“Hubbard’s poems are sharp, and combine description, commentary and imagistic bursts, combining the notion of home with return, arrival and the possible need for eventual escape.”
“Desire Path is a tight collection that boldly asserts a place like Surrey is worth paying attention to, not in spite of, but because of its contradictions; its tension between past and future, rural and urban; its identity crisis; its complicated role in shaping a speaker from here to there, then to now, child to mother.”
—textingthecity