Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010); The Keys to the Jail (2014); All Its Charms (2019); and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025). Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje is currently the Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including a dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, at the foot of a Rattlesnake Wilderness. She lives there with her wife and their two children.

"The poems are elegant, earthy, and pertinent. Kuipers moves language marvelously, and I love her understatedness, making lyrics of what could be ‘politicized’ texts, which are all the more persuasive for the transformation." —Marilyn Hacker, National Book Award and PEN/Voelcker Award-winner"Keetje Kuipers’ Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is 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"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 in flight, 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

• With Garbo in Palm SpringsAt Forty, the Mountains Are More GreenLonely women make good lovers,Getting Back TogetherThe Magician at the WoodpileBleedingAt My Daughter’s Riding LessonSpa DaysI Didn’t Know What I Didn’t KnowIn the Outdoor Shower with My Pregnant WifeCremello HorseI wasn’t trying to steal her boyfriend,SehnsuchtPoikilothermicLove Letter to a Friend I Cannot ReachI, too, took pictures of my bodyBrace CoveEmesisI Let Her Let ThemThe day after your mom dies, I go to see the witches,The WoundBoat Puller / Bird Woman / Madame CharbonneauWalking LessonsPregnant Girl CreekWashing My Daughter’s ClothesSelfishnessMy Mother Bought Me a ScarfInterviewCrossingLive Webcam: Ponte delle Guglie, Venice; March 2020Multi-Generational HouseholdEating Sea UrchinAt Our Hotel Under the VolcanoMeatSummer, AgainSeason Finale3,000 Miles Away from HomeDiapauseEating an Orange Before Getting Out of the Swimming PoolGoogling My ExGreek ChorusThe RatsNow that we’ve been married all these years,Polished Rough