LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT
POET / EDITOR
MUD IN OUR MOUTHS
ORDER FROM NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
FINALIST FOR THE 2026 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS
FINALIST FOR THE 20TH ANNUAL NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS IN POETRY
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.
REVIEWS
Ashton Freeman, “A Review of Mud in Our Mouths by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett,” Waxwing Literary Journal
PRAISE
Mud in Our Mouths uses the natural world as an anchor, reveling in its lushness while examining the speaker's personal history. In the opening poems, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett deftly uses flora as both metaphor and proving ground. The speaker succumbs, willingly, as in "Beefsteak Begonia" wherein, "I bow to your bloody / tongues as they open, / one by one, to speak." These poems are neither pastoral nor of the “man v. nature" type—rather, they consider how the natural world functions in superior ways to the human one. In "I Ask the Garden for Comfort," we see, "…nature / brutal, not cruel—watches / us rot, be eaten alive." This, in preparation for a dissection of the past. When the humans appear, they are packing despair and bad behavior. In "Stay," the speaker is already exhausted, "...this isn't even // your worst year (…) horror weighing / pockets like stones." The speaker looks towards childhood, traveling east towards their origins in Tennessee. With stops in the Southwest, the Midwest, the journey holds no leisure. The speaker could be gunning for salvation or wreckage. Grace is offered where it might not be deserved. The past and the characters inhabiting it are reexamined, and even with this distance, the reckonings never feel cold. Still, at the end, the speaker turns to the natural world, the reliable constant, some sort of salvation. Family, even when looked at with distance and grace, show us how we often need to leave to become our own selves.
—2026 Northern California Book Award Committee
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 (think: couplets and tercets) simultaneously hold it all—threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional grace—while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies borne 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 ONLINE
“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
