In this searing collection, Sierra DeMulder strips away the comfortable fictions we tell ourselves about love, grief, and identity, replacing them with something far more precious - unvarnished truth. Like a cartographer of the heart's hidden territories, she maps the spaces between ecstasy and anguish, between the person we show the world and the one we meet in the mirror at 3 AM. DeMulder's verses are love letters written in scar tissue, celebrations carved from survival. With the precision of a surgeon and the courage of a confessor, she excavates those moments we all try to bury - the ones that shape us, haunt us, heal us - and holds them to the light. Her queer perspective illuminates universal truths through a prismatic lens, revealing how our deepest wounds and most radiant joys are often two sides of the same coin.
This isn't just poetry; it's permission - to break open, to love fiercely, to claim space in a world that often demands silence. Each poem is an act of resistance against easy answers and artificial boundaries, offering instead a raw, revelatory honesty that leaves readers both shattered and somehow more whole. DeMulder reminds us that to be human is to contain multitudes: beauty and wreckage, laughter and grief, the sacred and the profane, all dancing together in the same skin.