Bethany Schultz Hurst is the author of Blueprint and Ruin (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize) and Miss Lost Nation, finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and in journals such as Ploughshares, Narrative, and The Gettysburg Review. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, where she is a professor at Idaho State University.

Other poems by Bethany Schultz Hurst in Verse Daily:
September 30, 2019:   "Evensong (O, Bewildering Picture)" "The animal shelter is on one side..."
March 23, 2017:   "Seascape with Evacuating" "all of the ocean creatures..."

Books by Bethany Schultz Hurst:

Other poems on the web by Bethany Schultz Hurst:
Two poems
"Letter to America"
"Bones That Have Been Reassembled and Displayed in Museums throughout the World"
"Broken Water Main"
Three poems
"Ice Cave: Shoshone, Idaho"
"its strange and swollen borders"
Two poems
"Evensong (O, Bewildering Picture)"
"what now have you been eating"
Two poems

Bethany Schultz Hurst's Website.

About Blueprint and Ruin:

"Through the relentless and inevitable lyricism of the poems in Bethany Schultz Hurst's Blueprint and Ruin, the Earth is revealed to be the beautiful, glittering, cold entity we've always suspected. It is a place harmful to us only because we insist on plumbing its depths and bringing up the things that were never meant to be brought up—asbestos, mica, helium, oil—letting them into our hearts and lungs and every dark cavernous space we're always so anxious to fill. While the storytelling in these poems transcends the figures that populate them, this story—of a family shaped by its mining town roots—is a story that Hurst can't not write. As she says: 'I tunnel in, headlamp flickering / on strata that's been mined before.' But this book is more than a compendium of planetary regrets. Through the power of obsessive writing, Hurst digs toward a place full of the vulnerability that ultimately brings our own humanness and the Earth's earthiness that much closer: 'what if ghosts / can only pour themselves // through whatever holes / have been worn through us // through whatever holes / we've bored into this world." Her poems brilliantly and chillingly locate that truth that so many of us are loathe to admit, that what we've excavated is all we have left."
—Keetje Kuipers

"Bethany Schultz Hurst's Blueprint and Ruin caught me off guard. I had expected it to be good; I hadn't expected it to be as magnificent as it is. I hadn't expected to discover new favorite poems in it, like 'Outlook Hazy, Try Again,' one of the most profound ruminations on memory and the connections between people I've read in years, or 'What Now Have You Been Eating,' with its Dante-esque transformation of the beloved—in Hurst's poem, a daughter—into a divine being: 'and when I catch a glimpse / of something foreign inside / her mouth // I will find in there // the entire world." This is a book to be read for years, to be surprised by again and again."
—Shane McCrae

"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 Hearst'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 offers up extravagant apologies: 'I'm sorry I did not stop by the cornfields to watch the solstice pour 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 that 'some song is surely spilling out.' I'm with her, this 'Queen of No Fun Anymore,' this Queen of the American Now."
—Diane Seuss

"'Prophetless, our next collective trick // is to vanish into dust,' Bethany Schultz Hurst foretells in her dazzling and troublesome portrait of an America given over to abandoned mines and water parks, where 'herds of bulldozers / instead of bison' dot the landscape: 'I am ashamed to have been so slow // to figure all this beauty... // constitutes / a disaster.' Still, as she says of a mannequin in a deserted mall, 'ruin / has made you extraordinary.' Nabokovian in its empiricism and sly humor and Rilkean in its yearning ('what is it I could call to / and be granted passage'), Blueprint and Ruin intimates music that 'could be mistaken for a hymn' in the ordinary wreckage of our lives."
—Michael Waters