Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

by Keetje Kuipers

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

96 pages, Paperback

Published April 8, 2025

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

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Love Letter to a Friend I Cannot Reach” cracked me right open in the best way

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book truly fucks me up (complimentary).

[Grace Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is vulnerable and inventive- I was fortunate to hear this poet talk about contemporary sex poems and describe some of this work as exploring what else intimacy touches in our lives. “Magician at the woodpile”, “Greek chorus”, meat”, and “emesis” are standouts. Okay they all are.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Selfishness
BY KEETJE KUIPERS

I used to sob in front of the dog—before he died,
before I had children or married my wife—his belly

helplessly pressed to the rug that smelled of his sweat
from years of waiting. I know he hated it, that it made

him uncomfortable, embarrassed even, if a dog
can feel the squeamishness of sympathy, like people I’ve

known who turned away from the sharp edges of my
breaking. Like them, he preferred me powerful, my hand

on his head or just beside the collar that told strangers
what I called him. Once at the city park he peed

on a person’s leg—this creature who had always known
who to bark at and who to give his silence—leaning

into their body, gently, under a sky of weak clouds like
stuffing pulled from a couch. He must have known

something about them that I didn’t. I cherished the idea
of his knowing, even as I cried, even if he didn’t know.

[CMarie Fuhrman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This incredible collection of poems shows us what can be accomplished when poet dares to be brave enough, not only in craft, and vulnerable enough, not only in content to write the poems that meet at the quick. This book gives permission; is a paean for women, screaming that we are not alone in our most intimate thoughts, fears, dreams, and regrets. Kuipers is an incredible seer and like all talented poet-seers, she allows the reader to see beyond the illusions of mirrors and cultures and embedded beliefs.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was absolutely delicious, rending, and spellbinding. So many poems—especially the sequence at the beginning—leave me in awe with their daring storytelling and transformative revelations about motherhood, past loves, and longings. This is spicy AND sophisticated. Such an empathetic and mature voice. I’ve read several poetry collections recently which seem to be at war with the world, the self, or parents. This is refreshingly healing. Normally I’m not up for a lot of genital references in poems, but these floored me with their elegance. What a book.

[Aye Gomorrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of depressing. Are we all just living walking ghosts of the people we used to be? Is making art just a way for us to repeatedly romanticize the past? Do we live on only through distorted perceptions of who we were and what happened to us?? I have such triggered reactions to written memories that remind me of some of my own because my body tries so hard and does an excellent job of forgetting painful moments. So much of good writing is getting an exact feeling perfectly described though. I could never… but when i read stuff like this i have new admiration/second hand embarrassment for the kind of people/writers who choose to relive and rewrite their pain to make something beautiful. Do all marriages with young children dredge on in sexless and painfully inescapable variations? 😭 Modern poetry that uses words like vape and pussy is a challenge for me. Alas i am a modern woman. Overall really good and creative and the writer seems cool and brave in a way I want to be.

[karissa✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know there was a time

before I met you, but that fact is like knowing
that the length of my veins could wrap around

the Earth four times or that each year on Saturn
it rains ten million tons of diamonds -- imaginable,

but just barely.

[Iara Moure · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bastante crudo la verdad. Tiene un buen concepto y una buena prosa, quizá lo que cambiaría sería que no repita ciertas cosas o temáticas, se me hizo tedioso por momentos. Pero, dentro de todo, bastante bien.

[Ekaterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw it in the library, picked it up and opened it to page 27 where the poem “I Wasn’t Trying to Steal Her Boyfriend” stared me in the eye, describing my last relationship to a T. All the rest of the poems are just as beautiful and striking.

[Vincent Antonio Rendoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

[Angry.Sad.Motivated · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. Honest.

[Elena Macdonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was lovely