Book Review: “Nightmares & Miracles” by Michelle Bitting

Nightmares & Miracles by Michelle Bitting 
Two Sylvias Press, 2022
Reviewed by Megan Eralie-Henriques

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Winner of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder prize, Nightmares & Miracles by Michelle Bitting is a poignant inquiry into grief’s infiltration of the daily. From the beginning, Bitting achieves the kind of meditation poets are constantly trying, and failing, to write. A poetic eulogization of her two brothers, Bitting’s grief is devastating and each poem invites the reader into her most vulnerable center. The reader can find solace in the shared human experiences of death and grief, and can’t help but imagine, in a way Bitting intends to be omnipotent, the weight of carrying Bitting’s grief as their own. In Nightmares & Miracles, gods exist as humans, humans exist as gods, and humans and gods are everything else in between. 

The world of Nightmares & Miracles begins large and intentionally shapeless, but as the reader journeys through pandemic poems for Lysol lovers and admiration for Dorothy Parker, Bitting’s lines begin to narrow. Grief is allowed to take center stage through newly short lines and condensed text. Sprinkled throughout, however, are small expressions of hope: “You live with death / and you make your life worth living.”

Bitting opens part I “Red Orpheus,” with questions about the shape a body takes after loss, begging the gods to reveal “At what point am I anyone?” This question creates a hunger within the reader, an aching for the answer that drives them further into the text, and then a hope that whatever answer Bitting has might be theirs too. At what point are we anyone?

At the heart of the book, part II, “Nightmares,” Bitting is drowning in the same “suicide sinkhole” her brothers drowned in. “Ice,” a dense prose poem, brings us to the funeral of her older brother, all hope gone. Woven within the nightmares are moments from Bitting’s childhood: Minute Maid popsicles, knits and puffer jackets, Sam Cooke on the stereo. She, like anyone would, retreats here in the heaviest parts. 

“Haibun For Letting Go” is a sort of turning point in the collection. Following the suicide of her younger brother, she pinpoints a few moments when she could have been different for her brother, more present, when she could have asked him to stay and loved him more. It’s this part of suicide, the wondering that happens afterwards, that causes the downwards spiral into the “suicide sinkhole” she’s already in danger of drowning in. But she catches herself:  “Can’t you love yourselves? To not is poison—a real shame—I’m not the antidote.” 

Suddenly, the white space explodes on the page in a beautifully haunting visual of her inner turmoil—a masterwork course in white space. The transition from dense prose is jarring, but the attention it demands reveals Bitting’s most intimate thought:
                           Solitary            r                                o                                   c                                   k


                           Where I can conjure                               no                                               one


                           No                              thoughts                              e  x  c  e  p  t                             of

                           Course              all                         I           can                                         t h i n k

                           Is          what                    I should             have               said                 what

                           I           should                               have done…                              …differently 

Michelle Biting’s earliest confrontation with grief was the loss of her childhood comfort item, “Blankey.” This loss trained her body’s response to sorrow. The blanket, her “enchanted place of adolescence,” told her she needed to control, to possess, her actions and others, so no grief could ever be a surprise. If she could control the end, maybe the grief would be less heavy. So, from childhood Bitting wandered this labyrinth of attempting to control the uncontrollable. “Here we are at the entrance again,” she laments but almost welcomes, as Part III, “Labyrinth,” takes us deeper through the maze of grief.

A monster arises out of Bitting’s grief, a “500-Million-Year-Old Sea Monster [that] Live[s] Inside.” Tangled in her need to control the world around her, but still drowning in her grief, she lets herself be swept “out beyond / The lifeguard’s safety mark” and grows gills. Bitting’s body takes on many shapes throughout the collection, which is foreshadowed from the start, but explored deeper as grief teaches Bitting to dream like gods: “When you build a tale taller than your own / … / You believe yourself / A cut above the rest / A little godly even.” If she is shapeless, she decides, then she can become anything she wants, even a “Beast–terrifying, a little spectacular.” 

Bitting does answer the question, “At what point am I anyone?”, whether she meant to or not. Among grief for her brothers is also the swelling love for her partner and children. Her son is both born and reborn after top surgery, her Phillip is constant and “never tedious”— a reminder that love can exist alongside grief. In “Think About Some Good Things That Have Happened,” Bitting confesses, “Yes, everything is / easier because of you.” But in the end, grief doesn’t cease. It persists, just like a labyrinth:
                           Here we are at the entrance again.
                           Depending on how much sleep I lost last
                           night, it will eventually act like an exit… 
                                                                     …Somehow 
                           the walls manage to know when we’re
                           hungry and claustrophobic are the same
                           time. They shift back a little, like clouds.
                           And we eat them clean to the center. 

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Michelle Bitting is the author of five collections of poetry, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award (C & R Press); Notes to the Beloved which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award (reissued by C & R Press); The Couple Who Fell to Earth (C & R Press); Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize, and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize. Michelle is a lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at University of Arizona Global.

Megan Eralie-Henriques (she/her) is an essayist and poet currently located in Northern Utah who thinks having two cats is a personality trait. She is founding editor of The Turning Leaf Journal, and is a reader/author editor for Exponent II. She holds a creative writing MA from Utah State University, where she also teaches composition courses. You can read her most recent work in Hearth & Coffin. Find her online @meganeralie. 

ID: Cover of Nightmares & Miracles by Michelle Bitting.