Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

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WINNER OF THE ISABELLA GARDNER AWARD

The daring and deeplysexy poems inLonely Women Make Good Loversare bold with theembodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.

Theseunforgettable love poems-queer, complicated, and almost alwayscompromised-engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernessesof unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question "defined not bywhat we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves." Thesepoems 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 liveswith.

Inthis book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with thefetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and atothers self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of thedifficulties and joys of living in relation.

Reviews

Who are the bodies/ within that body How does romantic love bring us together-- or isolate, or confound What if there's a baby on the way What if we come to each other naked as birds inflight,as stripped logs, as old photographs, as pure ideas What does a grown-up, clear, thoughtful, emotionally available, gifted lesbian poet get when-- decades after Adrienne Rich-- she comes up, still wearing her tanks, and takes her mask off, after the proverbial wreck, and makes a pact with the world, with her wife, with their earth and air Gentle reader, gentle witches, webcam watchers who remember the quarantine months and years, mothers and other parents who remember our biggest children's smallest hours, realists who want something more, collectors of words like poikilothermic and diapause who wonder if we can finally become different people, lovers of ordinary conversational language, doomed scorpions, pet rats, treehouses made new: this poet is your poet. Here are your poems.Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids and Professor of English at Harvard University

Keetje KuipersLonely Women Make Good Loversis a staggering, unpredictable, and inexorable collection.Caught in the nexus of hunger and ruin, Kuipers speaker explores the atmosphere between what she knows or almost knows and what cannot be explained. Recognition of the self, of others, Kuipers shows us, is a practice. A compelling read, these poems are nimble and vulnerable, mapping a return to the self, a return to longing, a return to the archive of what the body remembers. Donika Kelly, Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winner and author of The Renunciations

Keetje Kuiperss poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author ofWade in the Water

Author Bio

KeetjeKuipers(2019); and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025).and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje iscurrently the Editor ofPoetry Northwest, Her home is in Missoula, Montana, at the foot of a RattlesnakeWilderness. She lives there with her wife and their two children.