Ephemera

“Ephemera is a book about fearless fragility. Born with cystic fibrosis, Evana Bodiker has had to fight to stay alive. ‘Little warrior, you’ll break this fever,’ her grandmother’s ghost tells her, and thus initiates the reader’s journey into this book breath by breath. The breathing is poetry. Ephemera delivers a great delight in sound. . . . We are carried graciously on the wings of the poet’s scarred lungs. In ‘Fibrosis,’ Bodiker is speaking with Sylvia Plath, an obvious influence, who addresses Bodiker as a ‘blood shod woman,’ and tells her, ‘Little Sister, your invisible disfigurement emancipates me.’ The poet leaves the reader playfully in pollen dust during allergy season saying, ‘I want a veil of yellow, / for someone to realize before the pollen / covers the world again, that I was here.’”
—Loueva Smith
author of Consequences of a Moonless Night

“Evana Bodiker is a wonderfully alert poet, paying inventive attention to the world around and within her. These twenty-two appreciations of the ephemeral are very durably made, brimming with berbal delights: ‘My method is / savoring,’ as she says. Though her poems deal with challenging subjects—our all-too-mortal bodies, our families and loved ones, the incidental perils of our lives—they make their way to hard-won joy. Ephemera is a fine debut.”
—Michael McFee
author of The Smallest Talk
 

“Throughout Ephemera, Evana Bodiker delves into questions of hunger and desire in many forms. The tenderness in this collection is never without edge, the passion never without risk. Finely crafted and full of entrancing intimacy, these poems are both haunting and nourishing, like stepping into the ‘newly elongated evening light.’”
—Chloe Honum
author of The Tulip-Flame