“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
”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
POET photo by Alexis Fancher 
