Keetje Kuipers

Lonely Women Make Good Lovers Keetje Kuipers

WINNER OF THE ISABELLA GARDNER AWARD

The daring and deeplysexy poems inLonely Women Make Good Loversare bold with theembodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.

Theseunforgettable love poemsqueer, complicated, and almost alwayscompromisedengage 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 Ithat 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.