Ephemera

EphemeraSierra DeMulder, 2023 If every experience lasted forever there would be nothing to immortalize in writing. In Sierra DeMulders melancholic yet hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose. The poems read delicately, fleeting memories on the page. The deaths of family members who clung to life, the vital and breathing love she feels for her wife, DeMulder ruminates on what will come and

Sierra DeMulder, 2023

If every experience lasted forever there would be nothing to immortalize in writing.

In Sierra DeMulder’s melancholic yet hopeful poetry collection, Ephemera, she writes with the wisdom of someone who has learned to love and lose.

The poems read delicately, fleeting memories on the page. The deaths of family members who clung to life, the vital and breathing love she feels for her wife, DeMulder ruminates on what will come and what will fade.

Throughout this exploration of impermanence, you can feel the warmth DeMulder holds for her family in every line, even the moments she wishes she could forget.

Ephemera brings to life a complicated truth: that which is most ephemeral, most fleeting, is ultimately all that lasts.

Listen to Sierra on this interview with host Chris Margolin on the TPQ20 Podcast

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