Danielle Mitchell (Poetry) | Long Beach, CA

Danielle Mitchell is the author of Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry (Tebot Bach 2017), selected by Gail Wronsky for the 2015 Clockwise Chapbook Prize. She has also been awarded the 2015 Editor’s Prize from Mary and the 2014 Editor’s Choice Award from The Mas Tequila Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl, apt, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eleven Eleven, Harpur Palate, Animal, New Orleans Review, Nailed, and others. Danielle is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the founding director of The Poetry Lab in Long Beach, California.

Chapbooks

• Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry (Tebot Bach, 2017). Poetry.

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

“Danielle Mitchell’s chapbook, Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry gives me what a recent trip to Rome offered: foundation. Mitchell’s poems, like Roman structures, are heavy with heart wrenching observation of mothers, siblings, past loves. Mitchell poems capture distinct portraits during times that seem “as uncertain as lace” or amidst “an assemblage of orderless honeybees.” However her solid, lyrical blocks push the reader from poem to poem, culminating into a collective that echoes and talks to previous poems. You reach the end of Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry, only to flip back through the pages to make the linkages come full circle. Like a classic sculpture, this work celebrates the fullness of the body. Mitchell crafts the body— its fragilities, absences, and adorations, in a manner that is celebratory and honest: “Juliet once said she’d cut Romeo into little pieces to scatter across the heavens, but forgot to mention the work of such worship.” Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry is, like Rome, a collection of time, condensed space and history— a city of words on top of a city words, on top another. Like Romans, ancient and contemporary, dealing with harsh realities with wide-eyed honesty, Mitchell’s work reminds us: “there is ache & anger/ of blood & kingdom.” Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry does not leave us with ruins—what remains is hope and courage: “there’s nothing but darkness down there & if I survive I think I’ll like it.” What remains is a must read.”
—F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three

“Verve, wit, bold associations and visionary conjunctions distinguish the prose poems of Danielle Mitchell’s debut collection, Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry. With allusions to David Bowie and Heraclitus, a geographical range from Chicago to Afghanistan to the stars, as well as deeply private family intimacies as subject matter, Mitchell reveals new worlds of wonder and absurdity with a dark brilliance that is entirely her own. Although she warns us in open that [we]’ll never get out alive, in another she asserts that even though [t]he future is behind us now[,] I thought I should stand here and sing. I’m so glad she does. This is a delightful book full of marvelous mix-ups and wisdom.”
—Gail Wronsky, Judge of the Clockwise Chapbook Series and author of Imperfect Pastorals

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