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They’re Listening Now is a psychological history told through the lens of family, racial identity, and otherworldly violence. It spans decades, with its power generated by the daughter of a black father who survived Jim Crow. She is medium, oracle, organizer, and the keeper of devastating secrets. It will move readers beyond apathy and into a deeper understanding of historical trauma and their own interior responses to its effects.  — Yve Mitchell

Yve Mitchell’s poems entrance through sonic and imagistic spellwork that defies prediction. One always senses depths of mind and heart underneath these words. While there are recurring themes—Black life in America, gendered power dynamics, family and intergenerational relationships, mental health—They’re Listening Now is not about experience so much as it is an experience. Often cryptic or painting visionary scenes, Mitchell’s poems put me in mind of the Symbolists as well as more recent poets like Fanny Howe, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, and Joanna Klink, whose work is not beholden to linear narrative or neat logic. These poems invite the reader to be ok with not-knowing, all the while offering lines and phrases that ring with artistic authority: “Something like a shocked bloom reaching”; “Our blood is a crucible to air”; “My looming has / a magician’s hopeful sorrow.” Yes. — Luke Hankins, author of MAGNITUDE: New & Selected Short Poems

Sally Jane Brown interviews Yve Mitchell

Yve Mitchell’s debut collection, They’re Listening Now, is haunted by memory, lineage, and the enduring echoes of racial and familial history. In this interview, we discuss poetry as a body print, the architecture of protection and release, and the radical power of remaining partially unknowable.

SB: Is this your first book? Tell me a bit about your background and what compelled you to write this collection.

YM: This is my first book, though the stories here are decades old. I remember reading (and loving) Sian Hughes’s novel, Pearl, and I reveled in her noting that it took, “her entire adult life” to write it. I started this collection when I was a very young child via observation. It was a reliable source of intimacy, and it snowballed into a creative path.

I was raised in the west by an interracial couple who could never navigate the racial tension between them. I lived with extreme violence. My father escaped Tennessee via the army, and settled in California in the 70s as part of the last wave of Black migration. I was obsessed with watching how his life unfolded so differently than my white mother’s. I used all of my senses to imprint the way that people looked at him, feared him, and othered him. I wanted to document his grief; the shock was too heavy to bear alone. 

Read the full interview on Arteidiolia →

Yve Mitchell is a writer and certified yoga teacher residing in Asheville, NC, with her husband and daughter. She’s an award-winning graduate of the literature department at the University of North Carolina Asheville.