Description
If every experience lasted forever and the sands of time never interrupted our most loving moments, there would be nothing to immortalize in writing.
In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet beautifully hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. Each poem reads delicately and elegantly, just fleeting memories on the page. Split into 4 sections detailing intimate experiences from the painful deaths of family members who clung to life, to passionate love she feels for her own mortal wife, DeMulder plays a sweet song by pulling on her own well worn heart strings.
While maintaining a muted emotional intensity, the poems keep their grounding in reality, never straying to superfluous territory, perhaps recognizing their own ephemeral quality. DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade. Despite this impermanent nature, you can feel the tender warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.
Praise for Sierra DeMulder
Sierra DeMulder’s new collection, Ephemera, is a queer confessional, erotic and elegiac, a meditation on the inseparability of love and loss. In these sometimes-brutal, always-beautiful poems, DeMulder brings to life a complicated truth: that what is most ephemeral, most fleeting, is ultimately all that lasts — in memory, in dream, in verse, in the rituals of love and family that we pass on.
– Michael Mlekoday, author of All Earthly Bodies
Sierra DeMulder’s poems are delicate and brutal portraits of vulnerability, loss, beauty and hope. Touching on topics too often not spoken of such as miscarraige, death and grief- Sierra offers a doorway out of isolation through the sharing of her experience. At a time in our culture when we rarely take a moment for a deep breath, Ephemera reads like a warm hand on the heart, reminding us of both the fragility of life and the immeasurable blessings it offers when we take the time to truly witness it.
– Bunny Michael
Sierra’s poems read like secret passageways to the nuances of what it feels like to be a human—feelings that I wouldn’t know how to emotionally navigate myself without her words. She is able to craft the most intricate of moments in ways that somehow feel both deeply familiar and completely novel.
– JP Saxe, author of Dangerous Levels of Introspection
About Sierra DeMulder
Sierra DeMulder is the author of five collections of poetry (Ephemera, The Bones Below, New Shoes on a Dead Horse, We Slept Here, Today Means Amen) and the co-host of the relationship advice podcast Just Break Up. She… MORE
