Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

“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 “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   “Keetje Kuipers’s poems are daring, formally beautiful, and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.”—Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, author of Wade in the Water