This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with poet Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions). In their conversation, Lauren and Keetje talk about Keetje’s poetics of humility; her growth as a poet (and as a human!); the stakes, risks, and danger of writing love poems about marriage; and more: “If we go into marriage thinking about it as the safe place, instead of the place where the real, dangerous adventures happen, then we’re doing it wrong.”
This conversation has been edited for time.
About the book:
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 Keetje:
Keetje Kuipers’s fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.
Mentioned in this episode:
This conversation between Keetje Kuipers and Gabrielle Bates (The Adroit Journal)
“The Rats” (Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets); “Selfishness” (Poetry Magazine, Poetry Foundation); and “Pregnant Girl Creek” (The Adroit Journal), all poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers recommends:
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)
Human Resources by Ryann Stevenson (Milkweed Editions)
Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer (Changes Press)
Star Lake by Arda Collins (The Song Cave)
As She Appears by Shelley Wong (YesYes Books)
The Renunciations by Donika Kelly (Graywolf Press)
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan (Tin House Books)
Lauren Korn recommends:
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, All Its Charms, The Keys to the Jail, and Beautiful in the Mouth by Keetje Kuipers (BOA Editions)
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Alfred A. Knopf) and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (Catapult) by Melissa Febos
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates (Tin House Books)
Scattered Snows, to the North, Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain (University of Iowa Press)
The Wild Iris (Ecco Press), Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Meadowlands (HarperCollins) by Louise Glück
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer, editor, and sound engineer. An enormous thank you to Jake Birch for his assistance with readying this episode for broadcast. This episode is supported by Montana Book Co., located in downtown Helena, Montana, since 1978, offering new books for all ages, vinyl records, and community activism. For delivery in Helena and shipping online, visit mtbookco.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss. Our music was written and recorded by John Floridis.
Funding for The Write Question comes from Humanities Montana; members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
