Desire

'Trust Cole to give us the magic of a deeply embodied book. Prose so vital it seems to breathe and dance from the page. This is a beautiful memoir.' * Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer * 'What kind of writer enables the reader to inhabit the author's body? Jessie Cole can make anything from the curl of a leaf to a broken heart remarkable. No author writes about ecological, bodily and relationship grief as tenderly as she does. In Desire Jessie brings us home to the forest, sharing the beauty, danger and wonderment of this intimate world.' * Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country * 'I read Desire in one sitting and haven't stopped thinking about it since. Jessie Cole has written a triumph of a book, unlike any other. You will see yourself on these brilliant pages, a lit-up version you thought you'd left hidden in the dark. They will call Desire brave and vulnerable, a tell-all. But really it is a gift, a risk, a body, a revelation of electric prose. Cole has written a love story. She has shown us what it looks like to believe yourself.' * Sarah Sentilles, author of Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours * 'A gorgeous journey of a writer seeking out the inaccessible part of herself, of those she loves, and who love her back, and of the forest that holds them all together. Desire is a book of intellectual and emotional depth, exploring the flesh and nerves and sinew - as a mother, a lover, a friend and soothsayer. A tender joy of a book, about life and death, and of all the great pulls in between. Raw and fascinating writing that shimmers with truth and beauty at once. A confession, a lament, a celebration - I cannot recommend this enough.' * Tara June Winch * 'Desire is propulsive, honest and tender; it will hurl you back to your own worst heartaches, whether you want to revisit them or not.' * Guardian * 'Luminous with honesty. Revelatory.' * Nikki Gemmell, author of Dissolve * 'Jessie Cole is peerless in Australian letters; for me, she is the master chronicler of hidden psychic spaces. Her exquisite new memoir compels, startles and affirms the arterial centre that is desire.' * Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries * 'Jessie Cole is a delight. I don't know how she does it. She drags the gnarliest anchors from the heaviest depths and throws light on the hardest of places - her prose shimmers with warmth and breathtaking honesty. Desire is about the mystery of our bodies, how the wiring can get crossed, connections lost and one woman's delicate unstitching to find herself.' * Anna Krien * 'A love story about one woman's efforts to escape the clutches of trauma on her own terms.' * Readings * 'Written in skilful fragmentary narrative, this sensory experience of self-and-world is tender, vulnerable, brave and raw...Desire: A Reckoning is deep life-poetry, thrumming with vitality and unpretentious symbolism. Masterfully patchworked moments pull the reader's consciousness through a world of poignant aching and vanishing safety nets in this relevant reflection on self-embodiment. This book will appeal to lovers who have suffered through the exquisite terror of wanting, and will resonate with anyone who has ever sidestepped a rug to avoid having it ripped out from under them.' * ArtsHub * '[Jessie Cole] writes with a simultaneous tenderness and directness which places difficult emotions centre on the page, and forces the reader to confront the complexity of our inner lives head on... Cole's sheer command of language captures your attention so well that pages virtually fly past. I devoured this book from the first page, completely entranced.' * Canberra Times * '[A] book that pours itself on to the page: the warm, impulsive imprint of a brain in the throes of longing...Cole writes with brutal honesty about the links we are prone to make between sex and self-worth.' * Guardian * '[Jessie Cole] mines the delirium of her heart-replaying scenes of painful, emotive rumination on the page...[Her] writing is so elemental, you will find yourself unsealed by her evocations...Cole seems to have performed the ultimate act of love in writing this book...she has turned that love into a work of art.' * Age * 'Desire sketches a life's spaces and textures...Cole writes about [the body] with a direct and curious gaze.' * Saturday Paper *