Poetry

Beautiful in the Mouth

Winner of the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
Selected by Thomas Lux

What happens when the things we care for—children, lovers, parents, dreams, homes—are taken away? What populates our landscapes and how do we perceive those objects? In her debut collection of poems, Beautiful in the Mouth, Keetje Kuipers attempts to answer these questions. Written over the course of five years and a geographic journey spanning Paris to New York to Oregon, Kuipers’ poems examine contemporary female loss in terms of literal and figurative geography: the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside of a logging town. From her own unique perspective, Kuipers continues in the spirit of poets like Elizabeth Bishop to examine how loss forces itself upon unwilling landscapes and how those landscapes must alter to receive that loss.

Remembering Our Last Meal in New York

I eat chirashizushi, peel the raw fish
from their sweet bed of seasoned rice.
I know right now the beaten mares on 59th
stomp slowly at the snowy curb, take great
pitchers of air into their distended lungs
and bloom from between yellowed teeth
white peonies against the trees of Central Park.
I have tried to forget your light, the way it breaks
me open, even now, and makes me speak,
how it glitters in the gutters up and down Eighth Avenue,
swirling in pools of snowmelt, so many
sparkling tea leaves I still read for signs of you.

Praise for the collection

“I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new.” —Thomas Lux, from the Foreword

ISBN: 978-1-934414-33-0

© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2010

FormatPaperback

$16.00

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.