Keetje Kuipers

The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with. In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.

The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with. In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.

“A precise and elegant look at motherhood, love, and what it means to live.” —Seattle Met A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’ decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family—it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.

The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we've lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires. Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana's great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that's lost its way. Dolores Park In the flattening California dusk, women gather under palms with their bags of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered with the trash of the day, paper napkins blowing across the legs of those who still drown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirtless in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps, they lie suspended. This is my one good life--watching the exchange of embraces, counting the faces assembled outside the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock of the gay couple's hands, desperate clapping of dark pigeons--who will take it from me? A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Keetje Kuipers's debut collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and is currently an assistant professor at Auburn University.

This debut collection was selected by Thomas Lux as winner of BOA's 8th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Lux has also written a Foreword. His endorsement will draw interest to this dynamic new poet. Additionally, Kuipers' distinguished position as Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University should be emphasized as an indication of her talent and the expecations for her poetry career. Kuipers will split her time between Stanford and Missoula, giving her the opportunity to promote her book in different regions. In Kuipers' own words, the book was written "over the course of a geographic journey spanning five years and taking me from New York City to a wilderness area in southern Oregon, from the streets of Paris to the trout streams of western Montana. On this journey, the combination and distortion of these various landscapes-urban vs. rural, domestic vs. wild-allowed me to examine contemporary female loss in terms of both literal and figurative geography." Kuipers manages the tough task of tackling difficult subjects while focusing on communicating clearly to her audience. As she says, "Whether my reader is a man or a woman, I am ultimately most interested in communicating with my audience. My poems are a point of entry for discussion and conversation with the reader and they have no interest in being elusive or standing at a distance."