ORDER FROM NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRAISE
"These exquisitely controlled lines simultaneously hold it all, 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
READ
"At Love's Truck Stop, Laramie, WY," Southeast Review, 2022
"I Ask the Garden for Comfort," "To My Neighbor as He Downs Trees," "The Murky Slipper," "Private Property," "Autoresponse re: Pastoral," Waxwing, 2022
"A Poem in Which the Family is Not a Tragedy, Union City, TN," Fugue, 2022
"The Most Glorious Birds," THE BOILER, 2020
"Overwater," Glass: A Journal of Poetry, 2020
"Orchids," the minnesota review, 2020
"Object Permanence," ZYZZYVA, 2019
WINNER OF THE 2019 SEMO PRESS COWLES POETRY BOOK PRIZE
REVIEWS
Genevieve Walker, "Review: Poetry in Foglifter Editor’s Look Alive Moves with a Narrative Feel," SF Chronicle: Datebook, March 2, 2021
Risa Denenberg, "Broadsides to Books: Sublime Before, Sublime After," Broadsided Press, March 1, 2021
Susanne Salehi, "Haunted by Look Alive," Gertrude Journal, February 10, 2021
PRAISE
This is a book composed of poems shaped like doors, trapdoors, and gates, and rightly so. They offer us entry to the sublime, to the kind of aliveness only accessible by passing through death, where blooms are "bruises / both faded and freshly made" and "though the heart thuds with lack, / lack, lack," it flowers. These are lean, meticulously curated poems that nonetheless let so much in; loss, embodiment, injury, victimization, witnessed and voiced. "What chafes," Flynn-Goodlett writes, "lift / to light." This lifting into the light—one of the most crucial functions of the lyric poem—allows for a survival "half-forgotten as / tampons at the bottom of a purse, / saying you've bled, still bleed, live." Look Alive finally does not simply look alive. It lives. It aims a flashlight at my own dark corners. It sisters me.
—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett's smart, sensual, agile collection takes you to the prairie, to the creek, to the kitchen counter, to bed—muddies you, then scrubs you clean. With a speaker who keeps your secrets and shouts your glories, Look Alive reveals the enduring territory of embodied queer womanhood—efflorescent and as susceptible to pleasure as it is to harm. Flynn-Goodlett quilts together rural origins and distance traveled, along with rich image and hardwearing language, into an impressive debut with the weight of an heirloom. If you let it, Look Alive can be the guardian inoculation that pierces you with a little taste of the big grief and the big joy so you can survive them when they come.
—Alicia Mountain, author of High Ground Coward
WATCH
READ
"Think Well of Us," Broadsided Press, 2019
"History," Third Coast, 2019
"The Sublime Before (Is Someone's After)," Quarterly West, 2018
"Prayer for Appetite," Colorado Review, 2018
"Word Play," Pøst-, 2018
"Against Forgiveness," "How To Tell," The Rumpus, 2018
"I Hate a Poem with Poem in It," Booth, 2017
"Discharge Questionnaire," "Things I Could Tell You About Onions," DIAGRAM, 2017
"Will," Tar River Poetry, 2017
"Before the Body," Superstition Review, 2016
"Rage," Sundress Publications The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed
Following a witch as she travels back in time to stop something terrible from happening, Familiar dares us to delve into the darkness to find and embrace the parts of ourselves that are still trapped there, and by truly being with those broken pieces, make them sing.
LISTEN
WINNER OF SIXTH FINCH BOOKS’ 2020 CHAPBOOK CONTEST
LONGLISTED FOR 2022 THE PERENNIAL PRESS CHAPBOOK AWARDS
READ
WINNER OF THE 2019 CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE
ORDER FROM HEADMISTRESS PRESS
PRAISE
With a nod to the "provisional/grace" of our post-Stonewall era, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett limns the private & public history of one lesbian life. She explores and interrogates aspects of power in her own Southern origins and in her contemporary life. A dark humor pervades these spare meditations on childhood, erotic desire, and domestic arrangements.
—Robin Becker, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize and author of The Black Bear Inside Me
With tenderness and precision, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett writes us into a landscape of memory and precarity. Her poems are lanterns, each one lighting us a path into the past and the future. Exploring the themes of girlhood, violence, and desire, this collection shows us a world full of both wonder and brutality. Its pared-down images and moments of stillness shape each line into the cadence of prayer. Flynn-Goodlett's voice is unforgettable: she balances playfulness and pain, secrecy and clarity, hauntedness and hope.
—K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies and Bestiary
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett's Tender Age is a reckoning with the historical forces that give shape to the interior world. In these poems, the refuge of queer love and intimate partnership is always already in tension with both the outside world of racial and gender-based violence, and the genetic and cultural inheritance of religion, landscape, and white Southern identity. The speaker's domestic life is not a shelter, but a grappling. Tender Age shows us how love and language can build a bridge between what confines and what empowers. These poems live in the liberating space between.
—Sophia Starmack, author of The Wild Rabbit
READ
"Orchids," the minnesota review, 2020
ORDER FROM BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS
PRAISE
Twice Shy looks violence in the face—in all its faces—and recognizes how it victimizes (the "skin he unzipped you from"), but more importantly recognizes how we "all the time, carry survival." The voices of this collection become memory, become compassion, but ultimately become animal—one whose role is to survive. It begs the question: Is radical tenderness just as much an embraceable nature of ourselves as our brutality? Radical tenderness is indeed the kind of survival that Flynn-Goodlett champions, "even when taken between teeth." Twice Shy understands the difficulty in this vulnerability, but also doesn't shy away from its necessity ("the unfinished . . . both burden and ballast"). This is a writer to join hands with, because she reaches out honestly, generously. Thank goodness for Luiza Flynn-Goodlett.
—Miah Jeffra, author of The First Church of What's Happening
If the heartbroken poems in Twice Shy have an edge to them, it’s because they’ve been ‘once bitten.’ Here are fresh songs of experience—compressed, lyrical narratives for our savage world to reflect on. As the violence around us becomes all-consuming to the point of commonplace, the poet wonders, “Can / you forgive failures, operatic // at this distance”? Failure or not, as readers we “must sit, witness it”—not because something horrific happened once, but because what’s happened still is happening now and will forever be happening to all of us. This is a book of conscience-forming, full of sharp-toothed love and quick-witted fury; not for the faint of heart. You’ve been warned . . .
—Frederick Speers, author of So Far Afield, 2018 Lambda Literary Award finalist
The powerful, economic poems in Twice Shy all pack a punch. Flynn-Goodlet infuses them with violence—casual violence, systemic violence, and incidental violence—which is then draped in a fine filigree of Queen Ann’s lace. These combine erudition with chattiness, classicism with neologism. In one line spaghettifies is placed next to dotage, indicating an inventiveness alongside a readerliness. The violence of the rural South are rendered in tight and effective lines, allowing the beauty of their language to trump the brutality of their reality. “The taste of rope” is the killer phrase of Twice Shy, but the enduring image is of Abraham Lincoln scowling on a penny. This is a perfect chapbook, a thematically linked group of poems all working extremely hard and effectively to earn their place on the page.
—Natasha Dennerstein, author of Seahorse and Turn and Face the Strange
READ
"Think Well of Us," Broadsided Press, 2019
"The Sublime Before (Is Someone's After)," Quarterly West, 2018
READ
"History," Third Coast, 2019
"Prayer for Appetite," Colorado Review, 2018
"Notes Toward Softness," cream city review, 2018
"Bedtime Story," Vinyl, 2018
"Discharge Questionnaire," "Things I Could Tell You About Onions," DIAGRAM, 2017
"Will," Tar River Poetry, 2017
"Rage," Sundress Publications The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed
