This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 8 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2025.
Merrick’s final selection for the best of 2025 is from Mud in Our Mouths by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Northwestern University Press, 2025).
Content Warning: suicide
Stay
Wanting to die isn’t the same
as no longer wanting to live—
stepping, for a moment, into
the street. Yes, this isn’t even
your worst year, but you’re
of an age—horror weighing
pockets like stones. If you
walk down to the river now,
it won’t be as before—tears
gumming eyes—but calm
as thumbing a final page
and sliding the book back
onto a shelf. It would mean
you’d seen enough people
who, rather than treat their
pit bull’s infection, remove
her eyes; manatees carved
with the president’s name;
cities barbed to prevent rest.
Being alive is not the same
as wanting to live, though
drought-stunted magnolias
blush green this morning.
Once, when you were very
young, you camped under
one in a friend’s yard, woke
in moonlight and unzipped
the tent to spring’s white
offerings. So in your right
pocket, stones; left, flowers.
Sink fists in them both. Stay.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Mud in Our Mouths (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality,BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, Puerto del Sol, ANMLY, Fruitslice, among others. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.
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