The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. Engaging a poetics of humility, these unforgettable love poems lean 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.” In this queer and complicated new book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire, finding compromise in a body reborn through love.
** Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award ** Exclusive Cover Reveal & Most Anticipated Queer Books for 2025 at Electric Literature ** Starred reviews in Publishers Weekly & Foreword ** Recommended by Ron Charles in the Washington Post Book Club
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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
[W]ickedly erotic and ingenius... Kuipers expertly mixes frank expressions of sexual desire with the domestic, subverting common preconceptions and breaking arbitrary boundaries surround the body... This wide-ranging collection tackles love in its varied forms with originality and hard-won wisdom.
Publishers Weekly
[E]mbodies the erotic desolation of its title and is also so much more: a book about trying and failing to love men, a book about trying and sometimes failing to love herself, about how the present makes sense of the past, about motherhood and wifedom and all the quiet, surprising desires that resound throughout a full house.
Electric Literature
The experience of her poetry feels dangerous, capable of triggering changes both lasting and longed for.
Foreword Reviews
This is exquisite, risk-taking, fiercely alive poetry.
Alta
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
In her fourth collection, queer poet Kuipers compiles poems that consider love in its many permutations, tracing connections (and the disconnections or spaces that separate people) in tones that are, by turns, erotic, beautiful, delicate, funny, melancholy, lusty, surreal... This is exquisite, risk-taking, fiercely alive poetry.
Alta Journal
How does romantic love bring us together—or isolate, or confound? 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 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
[T]he collection calls us to pay this price: to be vulnerable not at the surface level of the strip tease, but vulnerable at the level of the long relationship, the overdue apology. The collection calls us to love it all – the wife, the stranger, the self, the beauty, the wreckage, the ruin.
RHINO