About
Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author two poetry books: Blueprint and Ruin, winner of the 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize through Southern Indiana Review Press; and Miss Lost Nation, winner of the Anhinga Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015 and in journals such as Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative, and Ploughshares. A recent recipient of a literary arts fellowship through the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she is a professor at Idaho State University.
Books
Michael Waters Poetry Prize (
Southern Indiana Review Press)
Out of a toxic cloud, an abandoned mall, and a pile of decaying insulation, from shipwrecks, hazardous waste storage dumps, and glyphosate-saturated cornfields, emerges the indelible, intimate, shimmering lyricism of Bethany Schultz Hurst’s Blueprint and Ruin. I’m with her in her lonely freak-out as she wishes for a benevolent ghost to soothe her newborn, “Clearly, even someone/dead could be a better mother.” I’m with her as the blade of her wit offer up extravagant apologies: “I’m sorry I did not stop by the cornfields to watch the solstice pout its light/through those half-buried Buicks arranged to mimic Stonehenge.” I’m with her as she jams her face into the ridiculous spring flowers, as she listens for the bird-that-is-her-heart in her chest, hoping the “some/song is surely spilling out.” I’m with her, this “Queen of No Fun Anymore,” this Queen of the American Now.
-Diane Seuss
Anhinga Poetry Prize and
Kate Tufts Discovery Award Finalist
From the very first poem to the last, each is processed by Hurst's unmistakable one-of-a-kind voice, imaginings, and dexterity; it leaps off the page with a masterful, complex range that weaves narrative and lyric; subversive wit and true emotional grit; social commentary and deep personal longing. Miss Lost Nation will stay with you, become part of your consciousness.
-Richard Blanco
Available through Itasca and Anhinga Press. Also at Amazon.
Poems Online
