ABOUT THIS BOOK

An award-winning poet writing through violence, solace, and hope

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in Our Mouths illuminates how we are all enmeshed in a web of violence and love. As the speaker of the collection drives cross-country to visit her family of origin in Tennessee, she reckons with the tensions between her current and past selves and the many ways violence—interpersonal, societal, and environmental—has shaped her life. She struggles to find meaning, questioning the ethics of locating faith in a natural world she is unintentionally destroying, and grapples with her complicity in systems of power and oppression as a white Southern woman. Ultimately, she rejects the idea of genetic family as a place of solace; instead, she cleaves to the liberation and joy of connections forged outside those strictures, where intimacy is freely chosen rather than preordained.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT is the author of Look Alive, which was awarded the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, as well as numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar. Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as assistant poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter.

REVIEWS

“Mud in Our Mouths elegiacally renders a queer experience of small-town America with care for her subjects, attention to the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors at work, and a precision of language and lineation. The poems consider the ephemeral: places and people once known, the people one used to be.” —Emilia Phillips, author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
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“I love it when a poem’s shape and content collide—when I’m asked to open to more than what, at first, I perceive. Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in our Mouths is a queer ecology in the language of wind. These exquisitely controlled lines simultaneously hold it all—threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional/grace—while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies born of light." —TC Tolbert, author of The Quiet Practices
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“Mud in Our Mouths elegiacally renders a queer experience of small-town America with care for her subjects, attention to the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors at work, and a precision of language and lineation. The poems consider the ephemeral: places and people once known, the people one used to be.” —Emilia Phillips, author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
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“I love it when a poem’s shape and content collide—when I’m asked to open to more than what, at first, I perceive. Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in our Mouths is a queer ecology in the language of wind. These exquisitely controlled lines simultaneously hold it all—threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional/grace—while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies born of light." —TC Tolbert, author of The Quiet Practices
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“Mud in Our Mouths elegiacally renders a queer experience of small-town America with care for her subjects, attention to the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors at work, and a precision of language and lineation. The poems consider the ephemeral: places and people once known, the people one used to be.” —Emilia Phillips, author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
— -

“I love it when a poem’s shape and content collide—when I’m asked to open to more than what, at first, I perceive. Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in our Mouths is a queer ecology in the language of wind. These exquisitely controlled lines simultaneously hold it all—threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional/grace—while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies born of light." —TC Tolbert, author of The Quiet Practices
— -

“Mud in Our Mouths elegiacally renders a queer experience of small-town America with care for her subjects, attention to the socioeconomic and sociocultural factors at work, and a precision of language and lineation. The poems consider the ephemeral: places and people once known, the people one used to be.” —Emilia Phillips, author of Nonbinary Bird of Paradise
— -

“I love it when a poem’s shape and content collide—when I’m asked to open to more than what, at first, I perceive. Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in our Mouths is a queer ecology in the language of wind. These exquisitely controlled lines simultaneously hold it all—threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional/grace—while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies born of light." —TC Tolbert, author of The Quiet Practices
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

One

Two

It's Easier These Days

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