Released February 7, 2025

Lightning Is a Mother

Poetry Collection

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.

This Strange and Wonderful Existence

Prose, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This Strange and Wonderful Existence is a collection of 23 surreal prose poems that explore the complexities, weirdness, and joys of parenthood and the multi-faceted journey to understand oneself and the world—a place full of love and loss, fear and wonder, clarity and uncertainty. These prose poems wrestle with what it means to be human—with body, mind, and soul—and to be a parent, tasked with raising equally complex beings in tiny bodies, in a world where dangers are everywhere.

Like the birds that appear within this chapbook’s pages, these poems soar with whimsy, magic, and imagination and dive into the vulnerable, deep, and frightening places. With exquisite language and captivating images, Jarmul paints a world that is dripping with wonder and ripe with sensory details waiting to be plucked by the reader. Unwrap this collection like a gift—the gift of seeing the world in through a unique, kaleidoscopic lens.