Click to Download – Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry Press Sheet PDF 

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“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

“I’m thrilled to have three stunning prose poems from our friend Danielle Mitchell. Her work knocked my socks off. I recommend reading all of them, then starting over and reading them all over again because, for me at least, I got deeper into the poems the more I read. The stacked images, the firm command of shifting time, and the thought-provoking insights left me impressed and looking forward to more.”

—Kaite Hillenbrand, Poetry Editor, Connotation Press

“Danielle Mitchell uses fresh, often surprising, images to splay open our emotional turmoil, both private and shared.”

—G. Murray Thomas, Editor, Poetix

“Danielle Mitchell is sending secret coded telegrams from a dark, underground kitchen. She is cooking with the usual ingredients of exotic adjectives and suggestive enjambment, filling her poems with lust, mischief, loneliness, and yes, food. But Poem Food is not really about what we eat; it’s about what eats us. Grab a copy and dig in.”

—Mindy Nettifee, Author of Rise of the Trust Fall

Danielle Mitchell (she/her) is an intersectional feminist poet and teaching artist. She is the Founding Director of The Poetry Lab, a community-based learning program that rallies in service of working-class writers around the globe. Danielle is the author of Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry, winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Prize (Tebot Bach, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Four Way Review, Transom, New Orleans Review, Nailed Magazine and others. Danielle has received scholarships to travel to Patmos Island, Greece to study poetry, as well as grants from Poets & Writers and the Ashaki M. Jackson No Barriers Grant from the Women Who Submit. She is the inaugural winner of the Editor’s Prize from Mary Magazine and the Editor’s Choice Award from The Mas Tequila Review. She has performed on stages all over Southern California including the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Danielle holds bachelor’s degrees in Women’s and Gender Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Redlands and is an alumna of the Community of Writers. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about misogyny and the Internet.

Website: poetryofdanielle
Instagram: @imaginarydani
Other Listings: Have Book Will Travel, Poets & Writers