Dummy Ventriloquist
by Michelle Bitting
Available Now: Dummy Ventriloquist
ABOUT
In her latest chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist, Michelle Bitting serves up a dynamic panoply of forms & voices, wielding the sonnet, prose poem, ekphrastic modes and more in work that beguiles & thrills as it deftly embodies memory & channeled persona. With an eye for invention and ear for musical precision, this poet chisels lyric-narrative gems out of chaos in her ongoing mourning & celebration of lost landscapes & family. All this in the spirit of art’s capacity to help us survive the present, animate the future, and re-imagine the past. The braided turns of dream, verse, museum piece, film, & history skillfully excavate, pay homage, and invent through imagined convergences & wordplay. Joan Didion, Film Noir, nocturnes, dead brothers, pubescent adventures, Marie Curie, the ocean, elegy, cemeteries & family luminaries, casualties of politics, pandemic, and a fierce embrace of her beloved sons & devoted husband keep this Los Angeles poet’s urban & imaginal terrains piercing and lively.
PRAISE FOR Dummy Ventriloquist
“I’m always eager to read Michelle Bitting’s poetry: illuminating and tender, cosmic and pulsing, an exercise in love, the song of someone looking to save, and be saved.”
–Blas Falconer, NEA recipient and author of Forgive the Body this Failure
“Oh Beauty. Oh Wanting. ‘Oh,’ as Bitting writes, ‘fragile basket/ we swing through thickets/ of time, combing the thorns/ for brighter berries…’ These poems comb through the thorns of life to find and feast on that red fruit, and Bitting offers it to us, ripe and succulent, on each page.”
–Danusha Lameria, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
About the Author
Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize. She won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recipient of a starred review and Best of Indie 2022 from Kirkus Reviews. She was a finalist for the 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize, as well as the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. Other credits include the Beyond Baroque and Glimmer Train poetry awards and finalist for the Poets & Writers Magazine California Exchange, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Julia Peterkin, and Rita Dove poetry awards. Poems have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, as well as Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly’s Poetry Awards. Michelle is a Senior Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at U of Arizona Global. Read more about the author at michellebitting.com
