One Year of Desire

by Sarah D'Stair

Sarah D'Stair's One Year of Desire is both celebration and testament to the journey, not the destination. Her exploration of landscapes, both interior and exterior, comes from a place of curiosity and healing. D'Stair's use of rich, vivid language and gorgeous detail pierces the heart with such accuracy. Her poems bear witness to the fragility of time, to family, to new and familiar landscapes, and the desires that reside in all of us. -January Gill O'Neil , author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009)
Sarah D'Stair's One Year of Desire is a tender, mortal engine of want, a "vibrato of a body at seeming rest." Here is a rare attention to how we encounter (and re-encounter) memories, the monument of the human body, small moments that punctuate daily life as "onlookers pass without / glance." I love this book for how it composes the universe in a cat's meow, in a piece of music, in the fullest embrace of one's belly. As D'Stair suggests, "this place is full of wonders" we could take by the mouthful if we'd just open. Open for this vivid account of finite time. Open for its rushing tide of living, dying things that arrange this brief world. -Jessica Q. Stark , author of Savage Pageant (2020)

42 pages, Paperback

Published December 3, 2021

About the author

Sarah D’Stair is the author of three novels, including Helen Bonaparte, finalist for the BookLife 2024 Award, Abstract, and Central Valley, and the poetry chapbook One Year of Desire. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Burningword, Waxing & Waning, Inwood Indiana and other publications, and her poetry reviews and interviews have appeared in West Branch, The Adroit Journal, The Rupture, and elsewhere. She also publishes academic articles in the field of critical animal studies.