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.

About the Author

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 Tepoztlan, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, at the foot of a Rattlesnake Wilderness. She lives there with her wife and their two children.

Reviews

"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

Awards
Winner of Isabella Gardner Poetry Award 2024 (United States) and Isabella Gardner Poetry Award 2024 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781960145680
Author Keetje Kuipers
Format Hardback
Page Count 96
Imprint BOA Editions, Limited
Publisher BOA Editions, Limited