LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT
POET / EDITOR
LOOK ALIVE
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
