‘Untold Fortunes’ by Zoe Mitchell
Women have long been connected to mythology and witchcraft, often as cautionary tales. Untold Fortunes explores the experiences of women of the past, both mythological and real, giving voice to many who were so often silenced. In history both ancient and modern, these poems tug women from the footnotes. Some are heroines, some monsters…or are they products of the circumstances society forced on them? And how do these echoes shape womanhood even now?
In this powerful collection, poet Zoe Mitchell examines what it means to be a woman in the world, through lenses of past, present, and future.
***Available for preorder now!***
Official release date September 23, 2025
US$14 plus shipping
What People Are Saying…
“In Untold Fortunes, Zoe Mitchell shows us the unflinching magic of women. Whether those women are placed in the modern everyday, the historical or mythical, there is power in every one of their stories. Mitchell never turns away from the difficult or disturbing, while bringing unsung achievements and new perspectives into the light – all of which makes this collection a very rewarding read.”
—Kate Garrett, author of To Feed My Woodland Bones
“With scintillating lyricism and incisive wit, Untold Fortunes pivots the ancient European trope of the witch to face itself in a moon mirror. Embracing the mutable light of myth and history, Zoe Mitchell seeks the painful truths behind the eldritch lore, drawing into her lunar orbit unruly women from Medusa to Tonya Harding; WWII engineer Beatrice Shilling to a modern British office-worker. Alive to the realities of political violence, yet disavowing faith in supernatural remedies, these curious, nuanced, metaphysical poems chart their own fearless rise to the challenge of meaning-making in a seemingly indifferent universe. While tenderly grounded in the poet’s lived experience of economic precarity, maternal love, friendship and self-sufficiency, Mitchell’s feminist poetry plucks on nerves drawn taut across millennia of nihilistic patriarchal power. Skillfully lineated in stanza forms suggestive of terse ballads and medieval infernos, her lucid music will have you believe that ‘the moment’ is still ours to grasp.”
—Dr Naomi Foyle, Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing, University of Chichester
“Zoe Mitchell’s Untold Fortunes is part rumination on what the world may promise, and part realisation of what it delivers. In this ethereal, yet deeply grounded poetry collection, the moon’s ever-changing roles as supporting character, critic, silent protector, and indifferent lover are observed like a morality play set in the theatre of the self.
Despite exploring its share of darkness, the true beauty of this collection is in its core message that while the moon cannot make its own brightness, we each possess the ability within to create our own light. This is poetry that makes you want to run at life full bore. A love letter to individuality and carving out a new path when the one set out for you isn’t good enough.”
—Dean Rhetoric, author of Foundry Songs
“Untold Fortunes unspools in bruise-coloured ribbon around women condemned by the world for summoning the very magic needed to survive it. Through these injustices, Mitchell considers the promise inherent within the title’s double meaning—what undreamed lives might exist beyond the ones taken or denied? The poems in Untold Fortunes are bathed in cold lunar light and, like life itself, offer no easy answers. Instead, reading them is akin to defiantly pressing two fingers against the beating jugular: I am still here.”
—Glenn James Brown, author of Ironopolis and Mother Naked
***Available for preorder now!***
Official release date September 23, 2025
USD$14 plus shipping