Ephemera

By Sierra DeMulder

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Button Poetry
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781638340645

Sierra DeMulder

Sierra DeMulder is the author of four other collections of poetry (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 lives in Albany, NY with her wife and daughter.

Book preview

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PRAISE FOR EPHEMERA

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, Dangerous Levels of Introspection

"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, 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 miscarriage, 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, Hello Higher Self: An Outsider’s Guide to

Knowing You Are Enough When The World Never Told You

EPHEMERA

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EPHEMERA

POETRY

AUTHOR: Sierra DeMulder

COVER DESIGN: Zoe Norvell

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

© 2023 by Sierra DeMulder

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Published by Button Poetry

Minneapolis, MN 55418 | http://www.buttonpoetry.com

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Manufactured in the United States of America

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-63834-063-8

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-63834-064-5

AUDIOBOOK ISBN: 978-1-63834-068-3

First printing

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for Willow—

my bluebird, my best thing

CONTENTS

I

Waiting

Driving through Pennsylvania in Autumn

Choice

After His Suicide

If She Were an Animal

Sacral Chakra

I Asked Why Have You Denied Yourself Love

Who Made the Music?

The Day I Told You I’ve Moved on

Hours before Dawn

II

How to Change the Pronouns in Your Love Poems

Now, Again

The