Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

Amy Irvine

Softcover: $11.95

Torrey House Press, 2018

Reviewed by Zak Podmore

My mother-in-law often borrows a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut to describe the south Denver suburbs where she lives. “The neighborhood of broad yards and narrow minds,” she calls it. Seen from above, the winding streets lined with thousands of single-family homes contain a few strips of green beyond the front lawns — a canal, a public golf course, and a few small parks. But mostly for dozens of miles in every direction there are only tangles of interstate ramps, rows of box stores, and streams of endless traffic flowing down asphalt riverbeds. Needless to say, it’s hardly a wilderness. Even so, every month or two someone from the ritzy neighborhood a zipcode over from my in-laws will take their pomeranian out for a morning walk, and as they’re passing a hedge lining the yard of yet another McMansion, they’ll hear a yip and feel the tug on the leash behind them. By the time they turn around, all that is left of Fluffy is an empty collar. Another pooch has become coyote meat.

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