Customer Reviews

Blue Laws

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This narrative collection tackles raising an autistic child, serious illness and a brother's suicide with precision and lyricism and even humor. The book's opener, "Trees," with its leafy branches contrasted with the long hair of the narrator's late brother and its stunner ending, is a heartbreak of a poem. Details stand out: the little cloth gloves and pink ointments of a sickly boy in "Good Friday Kiss," the "little bobbin of your heart/ spinning inside its quiet nook" in "The Sacrifice," about a mother's late-night sewing, and "cannonball of cartilage in the lake of her eye" after an accident in "Blue Laws: Provo, Utah."

Bitting demonstrates that simple language can be the most evocative in the final stanza of "The Edge," in which the narrator's daughter runs her finger along her mother's cancer surgery scar during a frank discussion of the end of life:

"Then we opened a book
and found a fairy tale to read
even darker, more outrageous than our own."

"Blue Laws" is neither a fairy tale nor particularly dark, but it is a book that readers will want to turn to again and again.

"From first to last, these poems grab hold of the reader. Bitting speaks directly, clearly, with the authority of one who has lived in the body, rejoiced in the spirit and investigated the troubled mind. Blue Laws is a journey from *doom*s grim boot*: the trampled, damaged and ignored, to the stolen ecstasies of sex and the sacrament and salvation of family. This is a new voice unafraid to reveal the self and willing to go the distance."

****Dorianne Laux


"In the deeply tender and carefully observed poems of Blue Laws, the "domestic de rigeur" is rife with surprising ecstasies and possible griefs. Whether writing about mothering, marriage, or a brother's suicide, Bitting unerringly finds the epiphanic moment that reminds us of what it means to be fully present in our lives. And despite everything*because of everything*to praise."

****Kim Addonizio


"These poems have the breath of life in them."

****Joseph Millar


"A strong first book from a promising poet."

****Ellen Bass


"Blue Laws is a book of gritty beauty and unexpected turns. . . striking lyricism and glittering imagination. . ."

****David Hernandez