Keetje Kuipers – författare

Selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the eighth annual A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize.

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.

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 ParkIn the flattening California dusk,women gather under palms with their bagsof bottles and cans. The grass is featheredwith the trash of the day, paper napkinsblowing across the legs of those who stilldrown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirtlessin the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps,they lie suspended. This is my one goodlife—watching the exchange of embraces,counting the faces assembled outsidethe ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine bythe bridge above the tracks, broken bike lockof the gay couple’s hands, desperate clappingof 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.

“A precise and elegant look at motherhood, love, and what it means to live.” —Seattle MetA 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.

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 daring and deeplysexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are 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.

The daring and deeplysexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are 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.