Robert Peake

In her debut full-length collection, Good Friday Kiss, Michelle Bitting delivers a ferocious and nuanced experience of womanhood. These are poems of the sister reflecting on her brother’s suicide, of the mother squirting meds into her autistic son’s cran-apple juice and nursing her daughter in a vampiric pre-dawn delirium, the uniformed schoolgirl in a tryst with her married teacher, the wife offering her body like bread to her husband before his long journey, the middle-aged left-coast mom facing cancer, plastic surgery, and taking up the guitar again.

The collection builds upon the success of her chapbook, Blue Laws, offering deeper reflection, sharper perception, and an expanded range of poems. Bittings work is not so much confessional as it is unflinching in its observation, including in its self-reflective moments. In the poem “Strange Flesh,” she thanks a nameless donor for, “inking the little O / on your DMV form, / for prettying up my smile.”

Keenly attuned to both biting irony and expansive tenderness, this collection addresses the question all poetry addresses—“what does it feel like to be human?”—and addresses it head-on.

In “The Annals of Suicide,” the speaker turns from momentary thoughts of self-harm to a noisy bird on the patio:

His crimson chest and pate teased up,
he reminded me of a clown
on a circus night gone south—rain
and the generator blows,
lights fritzing, the tent half-caved.
Still, under a spot’s drained glow
with one perfect trick
he murders the crowd,
the masses staggering to their feet,
in fits of senseless laughter
as his painted lips unhinge
and he gulps the flaming sword—
swallows it down without burning.

Though Bitting’s impulse is narrative, she resists easy moves and shock value, probing the seemingly mundane, not so much for big answers, as worthy questions. In the end, through moments of bold perception and astonishing honesty, we share with Bitting in the bittersweet “education in love / we didn’t know we needed / and never asked for.”

Friend and MFA classmate Michelle Bitting just published her first chapbook, Blue Laws, with Finishing Line Press. I have pored over Michelle’s poems-in-progress during workshop, but it was a very different experience to regard this outstanding collection of finished poems, carefully arranged.

From the opening poem about her brother’s suicide, I was riveted. Michelle knows how to make a strong impact by staring life squarely in the face. However, in this collection, she also demonstrates great focus and care, commitment to each aspect of each story as it unfolds—line by line, and poem by poem—into something far more expansive than any straight narrative could hold.

In a poem like “The Sacrifice,” Bitting realizes some of the best results any single-stanza, free-verse poem can aspire to achieve—the careful build-up to a remarkable conclusion, a human revelation. She addresses the memory of her mother sewing costumes for her junior high play—“diaphanous number cut from a swell of black crepe,” building up to address her mother “in the hushed cool of your reserved seat, … the little bobbin of your heart / spinning inside its quiet nook while you watched me / do the hard, privileged work of feeling for both of us.” The poem is as tight as her mother’s stitch work, spoken with veracity and the best kind of sincerity—the kind that looks unflinchingly at the complexity of what is.

I am also invested in the themes explored in this book: grief, parenthood, and the trials of a a sensitive consciousness in the mundane brutality of this world—from dental surgery and her son’s autism to the horrors of the nightly news. This is a praiseworthy collection, sparkling with observation—worth picking up and taking in. A quick search of the blogosphere shows that one poet has already, in reading this book, identified Michelle as her hero. Bitting has accomplished what I hope one day to emulate: a remarkable, even heroic, debut.