Ruined Beauty

Michelle Bitting’s sixth collection arrives from the ashes. Three anchor poems respond to the January 2025 Palisades-Eaton fires, and that catastrophe pulses through the book like a second heartbeat, coloring even the grief that predates it.

The opening poem, “Sudden,” carries Thích Nhât Hanh and Octavia Butler in the same breath without straining. Bitting moves between registers — mystical, domestic, furious, tender — the way water moves through cracks.

“The Clearing” is the standout. It folds Buzz Aldrin’s moon-walking observations into a marriage’s reckoning with fire and loss, collapsing memory and lunar imagery into something that holds its weight. The poem earns its ambition. Not every poem here can say that.

The book runs three movements: Sudden, The Play, and Prayer Meeting. The first section grieves two brothers (one by suicide, one by illness), a father dissolving into dementia, and a mother who performed happiness the way others perform grief. By the time you reach the title poem, that litany has become physical. You carry it.

Bitting’s formal range is impressive. “Manger, Emptied” is a villanelle. “MEMORIAL” is a linked-word chain poem where the last word of each couplet seeds the next. “I Get You, Norma Desmond” runs four pages, swallowing Sunset Boulevard, Euripides, Lorca, and Fosse without blinking. That poem alone justifies the collection.

The book stumbles where it reaches for transcendence before earning it. “The Grain of Gold Waving in the Sun” gestures toward radiance that feels willed rather than discovered. It’s the one poem that explains itself instead of showing. In a collection this sure-handed, it lands like a wrong note.

The cultural texture is Californian with canyon fires, Hollywood mythology, coast fog, and the specific melancholy of living near the sea when the hills are burning. Bitting wears that geography without fetishizing it. When she invokes St. Teresa of Ávila through the Bernini sculpture on the cover, it pays off across the whole collection. These poems are ecstatic in the original sense: torn open, still singing.

The framing matters. Editor Theresia de Vroom connects Teresa’s mysticism to what she calls the Anima, the female soul exposed. That frame holds. Bitting’s speaker is a woman who has buried brothers, watched a son through chemo, lost a house to wildfire, and kept writing. The poems don’t perform survival. They are survival, caught mid-motion.

Ruined Beauty doesn’t resolve its grief. It shows the transformation happening, which is harder to write and more honest to read. Press it on strangers. It will find the ones who need it.