Mud in Our Mouths

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Look Alive, which was awarded the 2 9 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, as well as numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar. Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as assistant poetry editor for the Whiting Award-winning LGBTQIA2S literary journal and press Foglifter.

"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"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 simultaneously hold it all— threat, violence, loss, love, joy, and even provisional/grace - while spilling, like seeds, to become bodies born of light." - TC Tolbert, author of The Quiet Practices

• Acknowledgments One To My Neighbor as He Downs Trees I Ask the Garden for Comfort Beefsteak Begonia The Most Glorious Birds Perseids Season Stay Careworn Good Work The Murky Slipper In Oakland Shadow Boxer Certainties Highway Thunderstorms over El Rey Court, Santa Fe, NM Tornado Alley Private Property The Memory of Pain Not That Again Apocalypse For the Dying Chick outside Whole Foods, Albuquerque, NM Passive Ideation Forgetting Siblings Long Distance Object Permanence For Queen Anne's Lace, Cairo, IL Auto-response re: Pastoral Dangers Two Our Time After the Mastectomy, Union City, TN Grandmother's Body Family Tree In the Produce Section of Super Walmart, Union City, TN It's Easier These Days Dollies For a Dildo in the Grass at Veterans Park, Union City, TN Last Gasp Scab Orphans Clarksville Elegy Evidence Locker The Christmas Orange Likeness What's Called Love, Nashville, TN Our Parents' Death Crime Scene To the Page Aubade for Every Broken Thing, Union City, TN Orchids Extinct Clouds Overwater Finding the Falls Happiness In Security A Poem in Which the Family Is Not a Tragedy, Union City, TN Confessional Ghost Story Against the Season Choosing a Transitional Object The Problem with Beauty Columbarium The Lipstick Lounge To My Mother's Ex-Husband Genealogy Out of the Woods Untitled At Love's Truck Stop, Laramie, WY Thank Yous