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    Mud in Our Mouths
    Poems

    Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Author)

    9780810148338

    Paperback / softback, published 15 March 2025

    88 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.113 kg

    "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&mdash 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

    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.

    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
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