Bethany Schultz Hurst
Winner of the聽2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
Grappling with both motherhood and the death of a mother, Blueprint and Ruin explores the聽juxtaposition of prosperity and loss. Filled with cultural specters manifested in structural ruin鈥攈ouses built on snake dens, malls with foundations in old landfills, a picture-perfect town聽designed to be eradicated in nuclear testing鈥攖he poems mine what鈥檚 buried beneath the fa莽ade聽of the American West.
鈥淭hrough the relentless and inevitable lyricism of the poems in Bethany Schultz Hurst鈥檚 Blueprint and Ruin, the Earth is revealed to be the beautiful, glittering, cold entity we鈥檝e 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鈥攁sbestos, mica, helium, oil鈥攍etting them into our hearts and lungs and every dark cavernous space we鈥檙e always so anxious to fill. While the storytelling in these poems transcends the figures that populate them, this story鈥攐f a family shaped by its mining town roots鈥攊s a story that Hurst can鈥檛 not write. As she says: 鈥業 tunnel in, headlamp flickering / on strata that鈥檚 been mined before.鈥� 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鈥檚 earthiness that much closer: 鈥榳hat if ghosts / can only pour themselves // through whatever holes / have been worn through us // through whatever holes / we鈥檝e bored into this world.鈥� Her poems brilliantly and chillingly locate that truth that so many of us are loathe to admit, that what we鈥檝e excavated is all we have left.鈥�
鈥揔eetje Kuipers
鈥淏ethany Schultz Hurst鈥檚 Blueprint and Ruin caught me off guard. I had expected it to be good; I hadn鈥檛 expected it to be as magnificent as it is. I hadn鈥檛 expected to discover new favorite poems in it, like 鈥極utlook Hazy, Try Again,鈥� one of the most profound ruminations on memory and the connections between people I鈥檝e read in years, or 鈥榃hat Now Have You Been Eating,鈥� with its Dante-esque transformation of the beloved鈥攊n Hurst鈥檚 poem, a daughter鈥攊nto a divine being: 鈥榓nd when I catch a glimpse / of something foreign inside / her mouth // I will find in there // the entire world.鈥� This is a book to be read for years, to be surprised by again and again.鈥�
鈥揝hane McCrae
鈥淥ut 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鈥檚 Blueprint and Ruin. I鈥檓 with her in her lonely freak-out as she wishes for a benevolent ghost to soothe her newborn. 鈥楥learly, even someone / dead could be a better mother.鈥� I鈥檓 with her as the blade of her wit offers up extravagant apologies: 鈥業鈥檓 sorry I did not stop by the cornfields to watch the solstice pour its light / through those half-buried Buicks arranged to mimic Stonehenge.鈥� I鈥檓 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 鈥榮ome song is surely spilling out.鈥� I鈥檓 with her, this 鈥楺ueen of No Fun Anymore,鈥� this Queen of the American Now.鈥�
鈥揇iane Seuss
鈥溾�楶rophetless, our next collective trick // is to vanish into dust,鈥� Bethany Schultz Hurst foretells in her dazzling and troublesome portrait of an America given over to abandoned mines and water parks, where 鈥榟erds of bulldozers / instead of bison鈥� dot the landscape: 鈥業 am ashamed to have been so slow // to figure all this beauty鈥� // constitutes / a disaster.鈥� Still, as she says of a mannequin in a deserted mall, 鈥榬uin / has made you extraordinary.鈥� Nabokovian in its empiricism and sly humor and Rilkean in its yearning (鈥榳hat is it I could call to / and be granted passage鈥�), Blueprint and Ruin intimates music that 鈥榗ould be mistaken for a hymn鈥� in the ordinary wreckage of our lives.鈥�
鈥揗ichael Waters