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
