Beautiful in the Mouth

New Poets of America

by Keetje Kuipers, Thomas Lux (Foreword)

Thomas Lux selected this debut collection as winner of BOA's A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "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."

Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.

Genres: Poetry

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, 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 VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently 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 & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crunchy-textured reality, that's what I call the poems in this book. There's flight but always grounded in the small sensual moment. Incredible ability to use the things of this world to express emotional truths. Here's my favorite at the moment:

4TH OF JULY

If I have any romantic notions left,
please let me abandon them here
on the dashboard of your Subaru
beside this container of gas station
potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.
Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet
waiting to be shaken open by some
other man’s hand. Let there be another town
after this one, a town with an improbable Western
name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get
a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks
end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really
gotten dark enough to see them because
everyone has to work in the morning.
I’m not asking for love anymore.
I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curious if this just came to me at the wrong time. Kuipers has a very sensory style (and often very sensual and erotic) that I expected to enjoy, but it didn't resonate at this moment.

[steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars.

This is a really good collection, full of desire, grief, passion. Kuipers knows how to make the reader feel with her words, and I thought the foreword by Thomas Lux was apt – he says “There are a handful of traditional sonnets, each beautifully tuned, made so well that you might not know they are sonnets on first reading, which is the point of the craft, of a received form: to do its job, not to announce itself.”. And indeed there were several poems I then had to reread to appreciate the form anew afterwards.

I’ll keep my eye on this poet! I’d definitely like to read more of her work.

[Ed C · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an impressive collection. These poems capture the body, the weight it holds, the weight it wants inside of it, the animals that know what we can’t say out loud. There is so much passion and pain in these poems with subtle but strong tones of desire and sexuality. I’m really impressed and so happy i brought this book to the beach with me.

[AJ Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poetry with tightly crafted poems from the heart. They range all over the country, with a strong sense of place, along with a honest passion. Some poems are very much New York City, which I love less, having never been enamored of that city, but others, set in more rural environs. I ended up dog-earing a dozen pages to remember, so I won't quote all those poems here, but one of my favorites is "River Sonnet."

River Sonnet

When the old she-salmon swam to my rock
where I had sat to watch her moldering
transform into a fruiting body, clock
of flesh stretched about pale pebbles, ticking
tail where her roe lay like scattered apple
blossoms the rain adhered to the road,
and her great heaving sides stained with the dull
flowering shapes of fungus, I could not know
what secret pain it took for her to nose
against the current there, the large head scarred,
flanks those of a barnacled ship: she rose
from shallow water, a calcified shard
bearing time's white etchings, and one dark eye -
lidless - that willed I mark her drifting by.

There is so much that is so right in this poem. The unexpected, yet perfectly apt, metaphor of the clock, drawn out to the "ticking tail" and "time's white etchings," both also perfect in the alliteration and then the consonance. The images are so perfectly the fish, and so it then transforms into the sense of suffering and decay, the hardship of journey's that are impossible for others to imagine, and yet we can strive to empathize.

Most of her poems aren't as straight forward nature poems. Many have to do with love, sex, and relationships. They all have a strong physicality. I also loved the pair of poems, the first titled "The Undeniable Desire for Physical Contact Among Boys of a Certain Age," with the poem that follows it, "The Lake Oswego Girls' Soccer Team at the Hilton Pool," both poems about the innate physicality in kids - the ways kids fully inhabit their bodies, a way of living most adults have long ago lost, or only have it in moments.

All in all, this is a great collection of poetry, by a strong voice, and I'm glad I read it.

Oh, and this marks my 30th book for the year, and my 15th book by a woman this year, keeping me on track to keep a perfectly gender-balanced reading list for 2014. But I'll write more of that in my blog.

[Joan Colby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly the poems are accomplished. The first ones in the collection seem like crafted exercises rather than being passion-driven. An overuse of adjectives presents a room so filled with objects that the eye fails to select what’s significant. It seems an unusual, and thus deliberate, weakness in a poet who has clearly honed her skill. Perhaps it is simply her fancy, adding earrings, bracelets, necklaces, jeweled tiara, rather than just one perfect medallion. However, as the poems proceed, they strut forth muscular and exact allowing emotion to trump style. Poems like Reno, Across a Great Wilderness Without You, What I Know, and My First Lover Returns From Iraq are strong and memorable. Kuipers is indeed a poet to contend with.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for the similes alone: "a hidden / birthmark like buckshot on your belly," "the hammock swaying on the porch / like a crippled moon," "a bedspread like a patch / of flowers freshly trampled." And my favorite:

the Dior coats
on last winter's sale rack just as sleek and black

as the pelt of that wolverine we found
on Rock Creek last January.

Rock on, Keetje Kuipers. (It's pronounced KATE-juh KEEP-urz, btw.)

[Tara Flint Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning.

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Across a Great Wilderness without You

The deer come out in the evening.
God bless them for not judging me,
I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe
and make strange noises at them—
language,
if language can be a kind of crying.
The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,
each bullet hole suffused with moon,
like the platinum thread beyond them
where the river runs the length of the valley.
That's where the fish are.
Tomorrow
I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled
stone beneath the bank, their bodies
desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,
the way prayers become more hopeless
when uttered aloud.
The phone's disconnected.
Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:
I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm
over my bed. It's the sound of them
shouldering against each other that terrifies me,
as if it might hurt to brush across another being's
living flesh.
But I carry a gun now. I've cut down
a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—
my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools
I've retired from their life of touching you.

[Joseph Dante · Rating 2 out of 5]

Portraits of time and place. I didn't emotionally connect with most of these poems, which surprised me. There is technical prowess on display here - a lot of sensory description, surprising language, and admirable use of metaphor (which is refreshing to read in our era of hyper-literalism). But I noticed that most of these poems felt very crowded and non-committal, very jumbled - perhaps too many disparate images and associations, too many leaps, that kept adding more and more distance. An avalanche of adjectives, especially. I noticed my favorite poems from the collection where the ones that seemed to take a breath and didn't compound too many devices - poems like "Desire," "Fourth of July," and "Memory, Eight Years Old."

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

"There is only one way to say this: We move in the night towards something other than ourselves."

[Laura (booksnob) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning collection of poetry. I highly recommend.

[Diann Blakely]

Kuiper's wonderful poem "Across A Great Wilderness Without You," recently arrived in my Inbox courtesy of the Academy of American Poets. In one of those happy coincidences, I learned that the poem was from her first book, BEAUTIFUL IN THE MOUTH (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which had been chosen for this year's A. Poulin, Jr. publication prize by Tom Lux--and, how weird is this?--not only was Al Poulin my first editor, having plucked HURRICANE WALK from the slush pile, but Mr. Lux had also picked one of the best debut collections--Anna Journey's IF BIRDS GATHER YOUR HAIR FOR NESTING (2009)-I've read in a long time for the National Poetry Series.

Journey's book was recommended to me by Molly Bendall, and a lovely Q & A with Journey will appear in the MS/TX segment of "Notes on the State of [Southern] Poetry," Bendall herself appearing in the first, devoted to Charlottesville, which also contains a beautiful contribution by Lisa Russ Spaar. I can't recommend any of these poets enough--or Mr. Lux himself!

[Cari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had this strong urge to read poetry (I blame it on Janet Fitch's White Oleander ) and I came across a review for Beautiful in the Mouth written by Janet Fitch herself and I just knew I had to read this. I enjoyed every word of this sensual, beautiful, and sometimes dark collection of poetry by Keetje Kuipers. My favorite lines were in the poem entitled "Finally":

"That finally coming to love you
has been a hard-earned pleasure,
so that every time you enter me
I want to cry out, Bury me,
bury me. Put me in the ground."

Goosebumps!!

[Eleanor]

Excellent, beautiful, and some of the best "New York" poems I've read in a long time, maybe because the setting is incidental.

Has me thinking:

"There are deaths that terrify me still / because they have not happened yet."

"My little empire goes to sleep around me."

"My soldier who returns home without his / hands, the fingers somewhere else still doing / their slow work of pulling a trigger."

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one talented poet. I was incredibly impressed by this collection: Kuipers has this wonderful irreverence (wind spitting sawdust curls across my / windshield like star-shards blown out a comet's ass) that blends beautifully with her lyricism and lovely, expert use of language. Several poems made me tear up. I really look forward to reading more from her.

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and lush, this collection weds startling images and haunting emotional refrain. Reading these poems is a sudden, intimate joy; hearing Keetje read them aloud is a humbling and profound experience.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

To me, this is a book that needs to be read on the page. I heard the author read from it and was very disappointed. Then I bought the book and read it cover-to-cover--it was a whole different feeling. Not so beautiful in the mouth, but terrific on the page!

[Leesa · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful in the mouth. beautiful in my eyes forreals. i read a lot of these aloud to my hubs and he was sometimes in that dreamy place inbetween sleep and half-sleep, but i was awake. and i loved these poems a lot a lot.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although she writes from the city and the country, I feel she is more at home in the country. Her keen eye finds the telling details and makes them uniquely hers. The grieving poems toward the end are contemporary and generous in spirit. A writer to watch.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful first book.

[Joe Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, honest, energetic & fun & deep, thought-provoking: poems that remind me of the power of what a poem can do.

[Broadsided Press -]

"The undeniable desire for physical contact among boys of a certain age," a poem by Keetje Kuipers, was Broadsided December 1, 2006. See it at http://www.broadsidedpress.org/more06...

[Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kuipers just nails this entire book. The language, the images...everything. This could be the best collection I've read in the last ten years. Easily.

[Letitia Trent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I already love this, though I'm not yet finished.

[Brandinicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this collection thirty stars if I could.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wanted to love this, but only liked it. there's plenty of artistry on display, but many of the poems didn't cohere for me. it would be good to read more of kuipers work.

[Carrie Chappell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really loved the second half of this book.

[Tasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely.

"...Just beyond

our trailer, the sound of trains hitching and unhitching
is thunder entering my ribs and I want it."

~from The Reno

[Michael Whalen]

Favorite verse:

"All bodies hold secrets. My lover's armpits
were whittled ampersand hollows. I clutched
at the spaces that were not there."

from "Diagnosis"