Notes to the Beloved

Notes to The Beloved is full of the physical world, illuminated by a dynamic narrative sensibility, a vision of down-to-earth love, an active yearning to understand the world, and plenty of kick-ass images, metaphors, and similes: You make a matchstick of your finger, /dunk the tip in Bombshell Red./Then your lips are two flickers, /in the shadows of your ears, smoldering/ flowers. You draw a smoky line/ between lid and lash and dash out./ After reading this book not only did I understand the physical world in a more intimate and immediate way but I felt more a part of it. And what's more I wanted desperately to be the beloved, the other that an artist reaches for. Isn't this what we want from poetry? At least, isn't it one of the great desired experiences? To be turned around, made newer, have been blown up, by a collection of poems? To be like Johann Sebastian/on the banks of the Rhine, letting notes fill the rivers/of his hands, then turning back/to compose the world, /map the road/aright with song, so/we could keep time/like this, getting high?

About the Author :
Michelle Bitting's first collection, GOOD FRIDAY KISS (C&R, 2008) won the DeNovo First Book Award. Her second collection, Notes To The Beloved (SPC, 2011) won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award and received a starred review from Kirkus. Her newest collections are THE COUPLE WHO FELL TO EARTH (C&R Press, 2016) and NOTES TO THE BELOVED (C&R Press, 2017). Poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, The L.A. Weekly, diode, Linebreak, and The Paris-American, and have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University and is currently a PhD candidate in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She grew up in Los Angeles near the ocean.

Review :
Notes to the Beloved brims with the language of a fully lived life. A powerful female voice, body, spirit and sensibility inhabits this book and shakes it to the core. Bitting is at her best here: unbridled, open, aware. Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men and Facts About the Moon Richly dense in both language and insight into the human heart, Michelle Bitting's Notes to the Beloved is a stunning collection of poems. As a fiction writer I am thrilled particularly by her voice, by the yearning of her poetic persona for a self, for a place in the universe, that yearning being the deeply beating heart of narrative as well. She is one of my favorite poets and this book will abide in me for a long, long time to come. Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain This amazing book will get inside you. Notes to the Beloved pulses with immediacy. The sensory language, the resolute momentum, a large and courageous heart--here is a rare, seductive wholeness. Michelle Bitting's poetry is at once personal and transcendent. What could be better? Marvin Bell, author of Vertigo and Mars Being Red The poems of Michelle Bitting s gorgeous new collection, Notes to the Beloved, feel like exquisite origami epistles that their recipients (and her readers) are asked to unfold the way the lovers of these poems have unfolded each other s bodies. These eloquent reflections on love both found and lost echo with desire, humor, and a fierce sense of continued hope, reminding us that torn valentines are sometimes the most beautiful. David St. John, author of The Auroras and The Face