Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

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.

Praise for Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

"Kuipers’s wickedly erotic and ingenious fourth collection...tackles love in its varied forms with originality and hard-won wisdom (Apr 2024)." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The poems are elegant, earthy, and pertinent. Kuipers moves language marvelously, and I love her understatedness, making lyrics of what could be ‘politicized’ texts, which are all the more persuasive for the transformation.” —Marilyn Hacker, National Book Award and PEN/Voelcker Award-winner

“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? 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

Eating Sea Urchin

For the moment, speech is paused.

In the silence of the restaurant, we consider

the orange flesh, sagittal as a stilled

tongue, before placing it on our own.

Like most forms of magic, I’ve always believed

in words. For instance, the time you told me

it was over. Not that what you’d said

was true, but that by saying it everything instantly

was changed. To change where you are,

you might press your tongue’s wet muscle

to a word round and glowing as the button

of an elevator and arrive a moment later

in a place unforeseen. Or use it to undo

your shirt one iridescent disc of a word

at a time until, tongue slipping delicately

in and out the stitching, you transform

into something that no longer has a skin.

But the tongue is not a blade: the blade

is the pain that opens the mouth and finds

the soft, forgiving muscle inside. Uni,

like any word resisted long enough, is salt

turned finally sweet on the tongue. It’s alright

to say this is not the life you want for yourself

even one moment longer. This is how we each

might finally become different people—

with the gentle, wincing crack of a knife.