Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
WINNER OF THE ISABELLA GARDNER AWARD
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.
Keetje Kuipers (2019); and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025). and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje is currently the Editor of Poetry Northwest, Her home is in Missoula, Montana, at the foot of a Rattlesnake Wilderness. She lives there with her wife and their two children.
