Winner of the 2021 Michael Waters Poetry Prize.

Grappling with both motherhood and the death of a mother, BLUEPRINT AND RUIN explores the juxtaposition of prosperity and loss. Filled with cultural specters manifested in structural ruin--houses built on snake dens, malls with foundations in old landfills, a picture-perfect town designed to be eradicated in nuclear testing--the poems mine what's buried beneath the façade of the American West.

"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. Hurst's 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

Poetry.