Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer, poet, writing coach, and workshop instructor. She's the author of a poetry collection, Lightning Is a Mother and a mini-memoir, Take Me Home. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net.

Other poems on the web by Bethany Jarmul:
Six poems
Two poems
"Ghazal: Like a Prayer"
Three poems
"The Home I Abandoned"
Two poems
"Uprecedented Weather Patterns"
"Becoming One"
"Suburban Souls"
"Self-Portrait in a Landscape"
"A Moment, A Memory"

Bethany Jarmul's Website.

About Lightning Is a Mother:

"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

"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

"'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

"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