Desire Path: Poems

by Migwi Mwangi

Desire Path explores how everyday life, memory, history, and politics work against and toward each other across communities and national boundaries. This collection pleats numerous a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, widows, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, glimpses of music by icons such as Bi Kidude and Kanda Bongo Man. There is eros, storytelling, and haunting joy here.

136 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2026

Reviews

[Mandi · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

This is a heartfelt poetry collection full of culture, longing and the realities of immigrants & the colonised.

This was very poignant and moving work.

Achingly beautiful and nostalgically relatable.

Thanks NetGalley, University of Pittsburgh Press and Migwi Mwangi for allowing me to access the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each page of Migwi Mwangi’s Desire Path was brimming with detail both familiar and novel. They say a picture contains a million words but these short poems evoke a billion pictures.

I was transported to parts of the world I have never been, carried through time to events recent and remote, and introduced to commonplace items through a new perspective. I felt at times overwhelmed by the unknown, but then Mwangi would briskly sweep in something so human that anyone who’s traveled more than a dozen times around the sun would feel in their bones.

“The best thing about a hug is to allow and be allowed to find safety in another’s heartfelt proximity.” Mwangi writes in “ode to the heat of a just-vacant seat” and then goes on to discuss the poem by Ada Limón, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” dedicated to NASA’s 2024 Europa Clipper mission.

“A hyphen is wind between flags. A hyphen underscores passage. A hyphen unhyphenates.”
This philosophical discussion around punctuation made me pause with wonder. What many would think irrelevant, Mwangi makes sentimental and significant.

I appreciated the end notes where some of the mystery of each poem was unveiled. I got context for why other poets were quoted, and some history that I had never heard before.

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mwangi's writing is deft, moving from the sensory to the personal to the larger-picture scale of current events, easily navigating the intersections of pain, pleasure, experience, race, (post)colonialism, culture, place, religion, grief and death... His poems are rich, vignettes of lived-in humanity, and they require multiple parses - exactly what I want from poetry.

4.25 stars, though this poetry is the type that you need to come back to, and see everything in new, brighter light.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an ARC of this book.

[Wendy Wisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desire Path is a rich, evocative first book of poems. These poems are about memory, migration, displacement, history, and home. There's a strong undercurrent of desire throughout, and Mwangi has a gift for language, description, and surprise. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance reader copy.