Hear or read the full interview at The Poetry Foundation, or listen elsewhere on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
In an April episode of Poetry Off the Shelf with producer Helena de Groot, Keetje Kuipers talks about her new poetry book “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers“, diving headfirst into the daily losses and loves that make up this intimate and fresh collection.
“I was not built to live with other people,” Kuipers begins, and what follows is an hour of humor and honesty. “I find myself in a house now where I share a bed with someone every night—at least one person, if not more—which is like, oh my god. And then there are these two other people, and it’s so many personalities. I mean, there’s only three of them, but it feels like 300 of them.”
Creating poetry out of an environment that seemingly never takes a breath, she shares vignettes of childhood, marriage—her own and that of her parents, her wife—that carry the listener right into the middle of the room. “When we lived with my parents [during the pandemic], I did not have a place that I consistently slept. […] So for two years of my life, I did not have a place where I rested. And so this poem happened on one of those nights when I was looking for a place to rest myself.” She reads aloud “Multi-Generational Household”, after which De Groot remarks, “Oh, it’s lovely. So beautiful. How can you make such chaos sound so, like, harmonious?”
With a tender voice that bleeds across the pages, Kuipers manages such alchemy all throughout “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers“, available now in both print and e-book editions.
“Multi-Generational Household.”
In the middle of the night, I come downstairs
for a glass of water and find my father
in the kitchen, high as a kite, the dregs
from his vape pen making a murky cloud
around his head as he stuffs his mouth
with fistfuls of nuts from a plastic sack
of trail mix. Tomorrow, he’ll turn over
a year of his life that men never used
to dream of seeing. Tomorrow, he won’t
remember a thing. But right now, he’s lying
on the couch moaning with the pleasure
of still being so alive. His frayed blue robe
falling open to reveal a pair of pajamas
I know from my girlhood of riding his back
across the living room carpet while he growled
like a bear. Now his sock-mittened feet
twitch in ecstasy as he tells me about
the color of tonight’s moon—bitter orange,
he says, the sky like a pot of dark chocolate—
hanging just outside the window.
Everyone in the house is busy making
their own sleeping sounds—the baby
like the faint wash of surf, my wife hopelessly
snoring away, my mother’s CPAP machine
filling in the gaps with mechanized white noise
while my daughter rolls over to kick her
in the ribs. Except this man, who’s about to
crack open a carton of ice cream, who’s
decided he’ll sleep when he’s dead.
—From The Poetry Foundation, April 1, 2025
