Michelle Bitting ( Poetry) | Los Angeles, CA

Michelle Bitting has work published in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, diode, the Paris-American, L.A. Weekly, Linebreak and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Feature on Verse Daily. Her book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award chosen by Thomas Lux and Notes to the Beloved received a starred Kirkus Review. A new title The Couple Who Fell to Earth is due out in 2016 from C & R Press. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is an active California Poet in the Schools. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon and is completing a PhD in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Books

Press & Reviews

In a multi-directional “one shape” of voices, time, people, spaces Bitting takes us in and out of her all seeing third eye poetics. We go into an orb of family, love, then we swoop out into the delight of humanity. And, in a sense, these refractions are the “the self’s / shady daguerrotype coming to surface / through exposure to light.” In day-to-day terms we find enlightenment and paradox—“ of death and peppermint,” of “birth and strange beauty,” of “Elysium nothingness” and “myth- making machinery.” I find Michelle’s cosmic mechanics fused with historical platforms akimbo and the “sheen” of personal meditations, a rare accomplishment. A unique treasure of visions and voice.
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of United States

There’s delirious beauty tumbling down every page of The Couple Who Fell To Earth. Michelle Bitting’s poems deal with the domestic and the feral; I’m caught up in “Eden-scorched mouths,” and “a sea of furrowed manes and exoskeletons,” and I never want to leave. She confronts personal history, the familiar body, the spiritual world, and the human condition in rich, wildly original language.
–Bianca Stone, Author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows

Michelle Bitting is a poet of the natural world but in a completely Transcendental sense. Like Emerson, her poems seem to claim that, even in the face of all kinds of traumatic loss, “beauty breaks in everywhere.” The Couple Who Fell to Earth holds things of the world up to the eye in an effort to glimpse heaven, or as Bitting herself says, “Accept me. I love the dawn. / The sun is a sea / I throw myself into…”
This book is all heart.
–Jericho Brown, Author of The New Testament

Additional Commentary

• C&R Press
• “Five American Poets to Watch” – Huffington Post UK 
• “Michelle Bitting Sits Down at Rainn Wilson’s Soul Pancake Table,” Harriet, Poetry Foundation.
• “Michelle Bitting & Andrew Phillip,” Transatlantic Poetry Reading
• “Notes to the Beloved,” Kirkus Reviews
• Tin House 

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