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); 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.