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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810148331
• ISBN13: 9780810148338
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 8.8"