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)