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Today I’m spotlighting a poetry collection entitled The Couple Who Fell to Earth by Michelle Bitting. Her collection is receiving attention from the Poet Laureate of the United States and others. Her work was also chosen to be featured by Kirkus as one of their top 35 starred reviewed works (that’s out of hundreds) in a literary publication/forum they are set to launch so that gives you an idea of how great this collection is. Here’s a bit about it:

These meditations, cosmic-toned, yet utterly visceral, demonstrate Michelle Bitting’s continuing growth and power as a poet of love, loss, the daily and deeply human experience, together with a maturing eye to understanding greater mythological tropes. Woven throughout her contemplation of the terrible beauty and struggle of family dynamics, corporeal desire, the injustices and revelations of life in the 21st century, thrums a vital connectivity to the mystic and mythological strains of the past, newfangled to the present in a way that ultimately sheds light on what it is to be alive and conscious of who we’re called to be.

To read Michelle’s poetry is to take a wild, passionate ride through the rubble of the quotidian, to be shocked by sensual discovery and awakened to a relentless curiosity for both the surreal and historical. These poems travel–an expansion in service of communion with the world, confrontation and acceptance of self.

And now I’ll share a few of Michelle’s poems from The Coulke Who Fell to Earth…

Elegy for a Body

There was a time I’d spend an afternoon
digging the bitter green sliver from a fair garlic thumb,
seed mountains of weepy Heirlooms, thread hunks
of yellow dough through a roller’s metal teeth,
the long Rapunzel locks strung from one end
of our tiny kitchen to the other, then snipped off quick
into boiling fumes. Meanwhile, my baby suckled,
siphoning fuel, sheen of buttered stars poking through
my shirt’s thin firmament; child I’d soon nurse to bed
only to get up three times in the night
and knowing that, I still had the juice to be cheerful,
to lift high the steaming nest of noodles,
to center that tangled gold on my husband’s everyday plate
and everything about the moment slow motion focus
on his face: grateful; love rising through the numbness,
melting the day’s cold. He’d look up at me, at his food
and lean closer into that delicious heat,
his mouth a flower flamed open by the sun.

The Goods

It’s the corporeal feelings
I crave the most: aridity, lust,
their aches’ redaction, love-weariness,
kiss-quest, falling in bed again
when loneliness breaks a sweat
and we mount a horse
called faith borne
on this wheel of March,
charge and stamping
heat of the noble
night that will carry us,
tongue and thigh
entwined and shuddering
against our own coming history.

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