In her latest chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist Michelle Bitting serves up a dynamic panoply of forms & voices, wielding the sonnet, prose poem, ekphrastic modes and more in work that beguiles & thrills as it deftly embodies memory & channeled persona. With an eye for invention and ear for musical precision, this poet chisels lyric-narrative gems out of chaos in her ongoing mourning & celebration of lost landscapes & family. All this in the spirit of art's capacity to help us survive the present, animate the future, and re-imagine the past. The braided turns of dream, verse, museum piece, film, & history skillfully excavate, pay homage, and invent through imagined convergences & wordplay. Joan Didion, Film Noir, nocturnes, dead brothers, pubescent adventures, Marie Curie, the ocean, elegy, cemeteries & family luminaries, casualties of politics, pandemic, and a fierce embrace of her beloved sons & devoted husband keep this Los Angeles poet's urban & imaginal terrains piercing and lively.