Tender Age

WINNER OF THE CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE

With a nod to the "provisional/grace" of our post-Stonewall era, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett limns the private & public history of one lesbian life. She explores and interrogates aspects of power in her own Southern origins and in her contemporary life. A dark humor pervades these spare meditations on childhood, erotic desire, and domestic arrangements.
-Robin Becker, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize and author of The Black Bear Inside Me

With tenderness and precision, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett writes us into a landscape of memory and precarity. Her poems are lanterns, each one lighting us a path into the past and the future. Exploring the themes of girlhood, violence, and desire, this collection shows us a world full of both wonder and brutality. Its pared-down images and moments of stillness shape each line into the cadence of prayer. Flynn-Goodlett's voice is unforgettable: she balances playfulness and pain, secrecy and clarity, hauntedness and hope.
-K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies and Bestiary

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett's Tender Age is a reckoning with the historical forces that give shape to the interior world. In these poems, the refuge of queer love and intimate partnership is always already in tension with both the outside world of racial and gender-based violence, and the genetic and cultural inheritance of religion, landscape, and white Southern identity. The speaker's domestic life is not a shelter, but a grappling. Tender Age shows us how love and language can build a bridge between what confines and what empowers. These poems live in the liberating space between.
-Sophia Starmack, author of The Wild Rabbit (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015)