Sarah D'Stair

Middle-aged, middling academic Helen Bonaparte has left her husband and children at home for a week-long Italian group tour with strangers. Happy with her home life, but needing self-renewal, she intends to sulk in the corners of buses and museums for a week, indulging in great art but scowling the rest of the world away. Until, that is, she meets Marieke, the tour guide, who becomes the object of erotic fantasies Helen didn't even know she had. As each day passes, Helen's home life recedes, only to be replaced with increasingly bizarre, invasive, and always secretive ways to get closer to Marieke. As she meanders around tourist gems of Renaissance Italy, Helen must come to terms with her new obsession, existing just on the border of dream and disillusionment, the imaginative and the mundane, the sacred and the profane.

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)