Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

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.

Keetje
Kuipers is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA
Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010),
which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry
Prize; The Keys to the Jail (2014); All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems
honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry
anthologies; and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, winner of the Isabella
Gardner Award, forthcoming in spring 2025. Keetje’s poetry and prose have
appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review,
Yale Review, VQR, Poetry, and over a hundred other magazines.
Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Katharine
Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at
Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships,
including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency.
Previously a board member at the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is
currently the Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches
at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano
in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of
the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake
Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where
she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Wellness and
keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.