David Brendan Hopes
July 2026

They’re Listening Now
Yve Mitchell
Arteidolia Press, 2026

Yve Mitchell’s They’re Listening Now is a chronicle of injustice and grievance without the tone of injustice or grievance. Precise observation and fidelity to experience crowd out the polemic which might have tainted another artist’s approach to these recognizable contemporary moments.  Some of the poems are clear and bony as translations from the Greek Anthology. As they put on greater complexity they also put on a singular and idiomatic music, an American girl with all that American din in her ears responding to the distant majesty of Yeats. Her pared-down lines deliver all necessary information in a compact space, with the bonus of terse revelation:

Holding is getting out ahead of a storm,
expanding a distance like smoothing a quilt’s edge,

making do with proximity at the apex,
a silent figuring of bones.

Or

I cannot protect you.
I will name what you are and wait out my body’s long memory
in the small of my back.
The small of my back is worth feeling small
and no one coming.
Home is not what you’ve imagined. Everyone here makes do.

Mitchell achieves the rare quality of being singular and universal in the same stroke. Her experiences are relatable, yet also grounded in a specificity of experience which speaks from and validates every line. The second time through you realize something else– the poems are funny, a lot of them. You didn’t catch that when you were first intaking your breath at the luxurious language and the keen honesty of presentation.

David Brendan Hopes — author of The Ones with Difficult Names.

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