Additional information
by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Author)
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.
Author Biography
LUIZA FLYNN-GOODLETT is the author of Look Alive, which was awarded the 2019 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.
