by Michael Strickland
Running counter to the noise of the world wide web and social media, tucked away within the mountains of Bannock County, Idaho lies a literary scene that flows with the beauty of the Snake River.
This is the first in a series of articles I'll be writing about the area's eclectic group of talented and energetic authors. One of my favorite writers here in the Smile Capitol is Bethany Schultz Hurst. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Sixth Finch and other journals.
Hurst’s collection, Miss Lost Nation was a Robert Dana-Anhinga Poetry Prize Winner Finalist, and won the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Read some sample poems from the work here.
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
Poetry is the essence of life, and Hurst tugs at heartstrings and teases the imagination.
In Miss Lost Nation we follow the voice of a poet through geographies of both place and heart. A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty outside a local tax business, for example, provides an opportunity to think about where class intersects with poetry. In this Whitman-esque collection, freshly imagined and carefully rendered, Hurst claims what is hers through the hard work of wrangling language.
- Dorianne Laux
As Plato said, "poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." Hurst weaves emotional threads of the human experience.
These poems are smart and fun but it's the empathy of Hurst's vision, her warm sense of who we are, that makes this book a marvel and joy. Often she directs her gaze, her compassionate intelligence, at others, which contextualizes the poems' private concerns and makes the world of this book feel very large and generous.
-Bob Hicok
Hurst is a Full Professor in the Idaho State University Department of English and Philosophy. Her most recent collection, Blueprint and Ruin (forthcoming this year) won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. I now have more poetry for my summer reading, and re-reading list.