Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
POET / EDITOR
ORDER FROM NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
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.
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
LISTEN
"Southern road trip inspires new Luiza Flynn-Goodlett poetry collection," New Arrivals, KALW
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, 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