Poetry

Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

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BOA Editions · Lonely Women Make Good Lovers - Sample

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.

Praise for Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

"Kuipers’s wickedly erotic and ingenious fourth collection...tackles love in its varied forms with originality and hard-won wisdom (Apr 2024)." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“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

“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? This poet is your poet. Here are your poems.” —Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids and Professor of English at Harvard University

“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

FormatPaperback , Hardcover, Ebook, Audiobook

Publication DateApril 8, 2024

ISBN9781960145451

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About the Author

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 (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. 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.