In this breathtaking, expansive poetry collection, Bethany Jarmul explores identity, spirituality, motherhood, and nature. Within these lyrically rich poems, Appalachia is a kind of Eden, a paradise spoiled by humanity. Eve, the first mother, becomes a starting point for the speaker's exploration of what it means to be a mother, an earth-dweller, a self. This book opens in creation, unflinchingly faces the dangers and wonders of our world, and ends looking into a future bursting with possibilities.
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian poet and writer. She's the author of two chapbooks and one poetry collection—This Strange and Wonderful Existence, Take Me Home, and Lightning Is a Mother. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in more than 80 literary magazines—including Rattle, Brevity, Salamander, One Art, and South Florida Poetry Journal. Twice, she earned first place in WOW! Women on Writing's flash essay contests as well as earning "Best in Show" award from Inscape Journal. She enjoys chai lattes, nature walks, and used bookstores. Born and raised in West Virginia, Bethany now lives near Pittsburgh with her husband and their two toddlers. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.
"What is the role of the mother in creation, going back—back farther? This book opens there, in that first moment when 'all of us arrived/in a vast array.' Lightning Is a Mother is as biblical and grand as this, as the title. It's that spark of creation, the finger of God, of devastation, that comes from the sky and is transformed, rooted in the land, in the hills of Appalachia, and in the body of that first mother, Eve, who is every mother. In Bethany Jarmul's careful and exact images, we see what all of this has to do with 'the girl who caught fireflies/ in Tupperware, bare toes in moss.' That girl is a speaker who is raised in the evangelical landscape of Appalachia. Through motherhood, she guides the reader to an understanding of how to break through tradition to truth. Ecopoetical in nature, this book is a healing prayer for Jarmul's Appalachia, a supplication to 'Deliver us from oppression, pollution, pauperism, from fear./ Deliver us from the bosses. Deliver us from ourselves.' This book opens in creation but ends in that future space where a mother, where the earth itself, where all of us, could be anything." — Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot
"In this breathtaking collection, poet Bethany Jarmul promises that Something real and beautiful, maybe fragile, is rooted here, then leads the reader through a series of lyrically rich and inventive poems that span spirituality, her Appalachian roots, environmental crisis, motherhood, and marriage. Through all of these roles and experiences, the poet fights erasure, claiming the white space of the page as a dominion in which to stretch her voice in an attempt to untangle myself from / within. This is made most apparent in a series of self-portrait poems that punctuate this collection—they act as both salvage and refuge until, as a reader, What you know / is vapor in the wind. Jarmul skillfully explores this negative space, asking What if my body is a permanent / vacancy, a cracked glass /jar, a bullet-riddled / balloon? Instead, these poems are flooded with the richness that echoes the way in which the body of the poet moves through this world, at last recognizing and warning that, Perhaps, I'm a black hole, / a darkness with gravity so strong / nothing can escape, / not even you." — Megan Merchant, author of Hortensia, in winter
"'45 species. 450 variations. // What else have we believed / to be only one, when they // are a multitude?' asks the speaker of lavender plants in 'Supplication & Creation,' a poem that captures a thematic core of Bethany Jarmul's Lightning Is a Mother: the speaker's consideration of her various selves as she grapples with her Appalachian roots and spiritual upbringing; the commitments of motherhood; her privately-held ambitions; and the meaningfulness of life. Yet, across these poems, conviction reigns: the speaker's multiplicity of thought and feeling not evidence of contradiction but of praiseworthy abundance. Because at the root of all we inherit, pass on, and reach towards is an abiding faith in both self and other, in potentiality and fruition: 'I am sewn together with threads of glory. / Brilliant to behold.' As is this astonishing debut, which invites us to witness dazzling constellations of self and language burst forth across the ether. All we can do is marvel." — Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear
"Bethany Jarmul's debut full-length collection Lightning Is a Mother is unflinching, visionary, a report of what the poet has built from grass and mud, from toddler socks and dust and wind, from 'Scripture hanging on the walls' and 'secret[s] soaring through space.' The poet takes us to the town in the hills, the red-brick house, the gynecologist's office, the plastic playground, the places where dread mingles with wonder. By turns razor-sharp and kaleidoscopic, earthy and ethereal, Lightning Is a Mother offers us 'word particles burn[ing] in a glorious celestial flourish' as well as glimpses of women and girls finding their 'fiery, golden selves.'" — William Woolfit, author of The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go
