Mud in Our Mouths: Poems

by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

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.

88 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2025

About the author

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Mud in Our Mouths (Northwestern University Press) and Look Alive (winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar (Madhouse Press, 2024). Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love everything about this collection. From the poems to the poet. I am sad to say that I can never give anyone my copy because it is so dog eared.

And a great way to start the sealey challenge for 2025