All Its Charms

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’ poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of fellowships from the Lucas Artist Residency, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

“Keetje Kuipers’s poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Wade in the Water“Keetje Kuipers’s All Its Charms is one of the finest books of poetry I know. It springs from the land of the American West like a cottonwood tree or a pronghorn calf and shimmers before us. Her exquisite ear makes each poem strike notes of delight that surprise, and her voice beguiles whether speaking to an invisible unbegotten girl, or seeing ‘the nasturtiums sweating on the vine,’ or hearing a father’s ‘tin pan trembling heart.’ Over and over again the poet sings and causes some bristling elegant new thing to appear before us. It is that ancient impossible magic that charms water from stones and makes art endure. Here is a perfect book of poems.” —Steve Scafidi, author of To the Bramble and the Briar“In All Its Charms, the third volume from this remarkable poet, we enter with serious pleasure into an unfolding tapestry of resourceful and intelligent figuration, her gorgeous language tying together elements of the natural world with the glorious ether of the metaphysical. Connecting body to landscape, seaspawn and seawrack to striations of the uterus, baby to the blossom of milk from her breast, Kuipers is a Lucretius of motherhood and sexuality, seeking consolation not for the limit of death, but from the trials of incarnation, tasting their splendor on skin and tangles of hair emanating from love’s body. Her poetry is a garland of milk petalled down her shirtfront, the page of life she’s written on the body. She makes me feel... She makes me feel like a natural woman.” — Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road“I exited All Its Charms begrudgingly, so charmed was I by the world inside its pages. Keetje Kuipers delights in the usually overlooked moments in nature and human nature—the small town drag show, the clear cut landscape with ‘yellow Cat dozers popping up on distant hillsides / like morels to be collected after the first warm days,’ the daughter's spilled juice the speaker wipes with ‘the old plaid boxers of the man I thought I'd marry.’ In these small moments, she locates our big truths. Her vision is original, and her voice—precise, questioning, sensual, wry—is one I'd follow anywhere. This book is a delicious accomplishment.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs“Keetje Kuipers’s luminous new collection more than fulfills its title’s promise. Kuipers works powerful lyric magic, transforming bodies— human and animal, living and dead— into rivers, trees, molten glass, angels, ‘a cup of coldening cider.’ Landscapes too undergo metamorphoses, ‘the sidewalk grows a golden fur’; ‘magnolias collapse their heavy bosoms.’ Time itself comes alive, ‘the last fleshy hours of another day ripening…’ In voluptuous detail, Kuipers describes her own pregnancy and motherhood. Her breastmilk is ‘ a sticky flower blooming,’ a nursing bra ‘flapping and fearless, one wing taking flight…’ Even when she’s describing death, her images delight, maggots are ‘glossy’ a sparrow’s heart ‘a jewel hidden in haste.’ An awareness of life’s fragility, of the passage of time, runs through these poems, yet the reader feels the pulse of life’s robust insistence. All Its Charms is a book of ‘plentitude, mass, sweetness contained.’” —Ellen Bass, author of Like a Beggar“Keetje Kuipers’s collection charms not with flattery, but more like a good friend who cares enough to tell the hand-to-God truth to your face. This flint-eyed but tender honesty comes across in Kuipers’s minute observations of the American landscape as well as of the pleasures and disappointments of the body. The poems in All Its Charms are also bracingly candid about the polarities of parenthood: the movement between joy at new life and fear at the army of small, lurking dangers that threaten it. The language and images may be startling in these pages, but the insights are austere and lay bare a necessary corner of the human world.” —Iain Haley Pollock, author of Ghost, like a PlaceI find something new to love every time I open this book. All Its Charms is a collection of poems from a wonderful poet at the height of her powers. It is a book to be read in a sitting, then revisited, again and again, slowly, and savored.” Chris La Tray, The Missoulian