Here is a book as lovely as the bird it follows: a pleasure from beginning to end. Even more so, Tracking Desire is a vivid, embodied, unflinching look at the consequences of our lives and a prayer for the emancipation of the human spirit. The pages contain so much-a kind of translation of the holy, as if embroidered with gold thread-that I expect them to go flying off into their own heavens. Here is modern mythology, beautifully written. With this work, Susan Cerulean takes her well-earned place among the country's beloved nature writers.

—Janisse Ray, author of Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home

One can search the breadth of North America, the tropics, and beyond seeking birds, and never find any species more spectacular than the swallow-tailed kite. Returned to Florida after a decade and a half in the West, I am now privileged to see swallow-tailed kites on an almost daily basis during their breeding season-even in my own backyard! I can only hope this experience will continue. Susan Cerulean has captured the essence of this most graceful of birds in Tracking Desire, a beautifully written and intensely personal testimony to reawakened wonder and wildness. Let us hope this book will stimulate redoubled efforts to protect and restore this vanishing, feathered treasure.

—Reed F. Noss, author of Saving Nature’s Legacy

On delicate wings, Susan Cerulean lifts us toward the mystery of who we are, we human beings, and where we belong in this world of winged and rooted things. As she seeks an intimate connection with her beloved, imperiled swallow-tailed kites, she reminds us of the essential connections between science and spirit, landscape and stories, short-term decisions and the long-term survival of the natural systems that sustain us. This is rare and wonderful nature writing.

—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Riverwalking and The Pine Island Paradox

A beautiful collection of interconnected essays, often personal, always accessible . . . there are passages in Tracking Desire that are surprising, unexpected, and brilliant. . . . Cerulean's words are poetry even among scientific study . . . Both knowledge and wisdom-their own necessary beauty-are the welcome gifts of Tracking Desire.

—Terrain.org

An honest book, finely written . . . Her narrative-from the obsessive pursuit of kites to a cry against human destruction of other forms of life-is a deeply personal journey. It is also the author's attempt to 'dive for spirit, the invisible river of being that connects us all at one time, all the time.'

—Audubon

Cerulean's message, however, is more complex, deeper than a mere recitation of the harm inflicted on our environment and the other species that inhabit it. There is a spiritual dimension to this lyrical book, an invitation to readers to examine our own passions and our own connections and discover what time spent with wildlife might restore to us.

—Tallahassee Democrat

Cerulean's account moves as fluidly as a kite in flight-the birds are in constant motion-and weaves science, family history and interior musings that blend the fabric of her life with the fabric of the kite's life history.

—Ledger

In a lovely series of essays, Cerulean explores the hunger for intimacy, the unnameable longing, that can cause the connection with nature that she found with the kite but can also cause the destruction of the very thing one desires. . . . This lyrical book belongs in all libraries where readers demand environmental writing.

—Booklist