Keetje Kuipers: On Fluctuating Value, the Gift of Time, Strap-Ons,and Her New Poetry Collection ‘Lonely Women Make Good Lovers’

Keetje Kuipers proves with her fourth book Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions, 2025) that poetry, like wine, only gets better with age. This collection examines the domesticity and dailiness of the sexual body: a pregnant woman taking a shower, a strap-on being found in a moving box, cleaning the towels after period sex. Rather than a salacious retelling of sexual exploits, this book deftly examines how our bodies do not wither past our society-assigned “sexual prime,” as these poems ask what intimacy means both in relationships current and past.

To read Kuipers’s work, like always, is a revelatory experience. Her confidence and lack of shame shine, as do her gorgeous imagery and engaging voice. I spoke with Kuipers over a video call about this book, and how it has been decades in the making.

Gabrielle Grace Hogan: This is your fourth book of poetry—how has your process for publishing a book evolved? How has this process felt different from the first, second, and even third books, both in the publishing process and in the content of the work?

Keetje Kuipers: The thing that comes to mind first is that I thought this isn’t going to feel vulnerable anymore. What has been surprising for me is that it does still feel vulnerable, and it does still feel dangerous and risky to put a book out into the world, even though this particular book is one that I feel so good about, and just confident and comfortable with. I’m so happy to give this book to the world.

This book also feels different to me because all my previous books are so much about me, and this book, ostensibly, is also about me, but it’s really about the people in my life: my friends, my family, my wife, much more than any of my previous books. I feel in the past, I was telling my own stories. I have power and control over my own stories, whereas publishing poems where my wife is such a prominent figure, or where I’m reflecting on old friendships that have a lot of value to me, and trying to put into words the places where I’ve screwed those friendships up, or where I’ve fallen short—all of it feels riskier and more dangerous in terms of doing other people's stories justice. My wife would say, “Oh, those poems really aren’t me, that’s not really my story,” and she’s right, and the poems about friendships are about my experience with those friendships, of course. But there is still something that feels more relational about this collection, and I like that. I mean, poetry is a very self-centered art in many ways, and so writing more relationally is part of the work of humbling myself inside the poems, acknowledging who I’m asking to join me in those poems.

I think a lot of poems about gratitude and joy these days are really self-centric. Like, I’m thinking about the kind of poem that has a tree in bloom in it, and the speaker is like, “And then I saw the tree in bloom and I didn’t hate the world anymore and I was okay.” Which, I mean, is great. I’m all for trees in bloom and fewer people hating the world. But that is a really one-way street. The tree is not getting anything from the deal in that poem. Whereas when you look at a poet like Jill McDonough, who is writing all these poems where people are in relation to each other—and I love people in relation to plants and animals, I mean, the plants and animals are getting our consideration out of that deal, which is not nothing during the Anthropocene because if we don’t hate the world then we might actually try harder not to kill it. But anyway, Jill is writing these poems where she says people’s names, where she describes her pain and their pain, her joy and their joy, where it’s complicated and all mixed-up and not solidly epiphanic at all except that the epiphany is that we are in this shit together. And those poems are honestly mind-blowing. The permeability of our fragile human selves—all the fake walls we put up against being touched by each other and how absolutely fake they are—that is all right there in those poems. A poem like that feels revolutionary to me. And I want to try to write those poems, those are the poems I’m going for.

GGH: Yeah, that’s an amazing answer. 

You posted about this on Instagram, saying what you were most excited about having the book out in the world was “looking forward to feeling sexy, which is one way of feeling seen.” This is obviously a thread in the collection, not sexy for the sake of shock value, but for examining the way sex can both be the most intimate thing in the world and the strongest barrier against intimacy. Can you speak on what compelled you to write a “sexy book,” and on the idea of sexuality as witness or as shadow?

KK: The way that I have conceived of myself as sexy and as deserving of feeling desire or feeling desired has changed a lot over time. I have a twelve-year-old daughter, and I think about, at twelve, what was already shaping my ideas of myself as desirable, and what was already shaping my ideas about what I might desire sexually. 

Being partnered with a woman after decades of dating men, and then also having children, my idea of myself as a sexual being underwent a lot of dramatic changes. When my daughter was born, I can remember thinking “Well, I’m basically dead now.” I look back now and I think, “Oh, my God, not only was I not dead then, but I’m not dead now, not even close.” And certainly, there is no need for me to be invisible in the world, including my sexiness. So when I was thinking about this book and the ways that I wanted to own it and be present in it, I was thinking about my last book, All Its Charms, which is a book that I struggled to own for myself when it was manuscript form because, well, it has a lot of poems that mention a baby. I wrote those poems when I had a baby, but I eventually realized that those poems are about a million things: transformation, social justice, the natural environment. They’re about finding love. But I use the baby to talk about those things, and because I used the baby to talk about them, I mistakenly thought that that book wouldn’t matter, that it wouldn’t matter to anyone else. It would have very little value, because mothers have very little value in our culture. I didn’t want to make that mistake with this book, that these sex poems and these love poems and these poems of reawakening to my own body didn’t matter just because I’m a woman and forty-five and a mom and queer—all the reasons for the world to say I’m an inconsequential voice were all reasons for me to decide that they did matter, and to make sure that I owned them.

GGH: Sex can often be quite a coy topic in poetry, and lesbian sex especially, and many of the poems in here are decidedly unsubtle about their subject matter. Was there something important to this aspect of the collection for you—not just to be a collection engaging with lesbianism, but to name the thing with no sense of coyness?

KK: I wanted these poems to meet each moment or object in a way that normalizes it. The strap-on doesn’t live in this one world that is just sexy: like, after it’s used, it has to be washed, right? Where’s the poem where the strap-on gets cleaned? Where is the dailiness of the strap-on, I mean, where is it stored? How is it kept? It’s not even so much subtlety as the balance of the lived experience, which is that our sexual selves walk around in the world all day long. You go to the grocery store, every single person that you see has probably had a sexual experience, maybe recently, maybe five minutes ago, and here we are walking around with our clothes on as if that didn’t happen. It all lives in that same body. I think about the poem “Greek Chorus,” which is the long masturbation poem in the book, and the ways in which that poem, too, is about daily life.

I want to mention, too, there’s this one poem in the book that people seem particularly interested in, and it’s also about the dailiness—or, in this case, the lack of dailiness—of sex. It’s not a poem that I thought of as particularly attention-catching. It seemed like a quieter poem to me, one that might fly under the radar for the most part. But this poem comes up in almost every review or interview I’ve done. And you didn’t bring it up in this one and now here I am bringing it up, but I’m bringing it up because each time I get asked about it I’m kind of caught off-guard and don’t really know what to say about the poem and now, having this conversation with you, I feel like maybe I might have something to say about it. The poem is called “Summer, Again,” and it’s about being married and not having sex for a while, so a marriage with this unchosen celibacy inside of it. And I don’t know why people are so into this poem. Maybe they’re just curious about it. Or maybe, my other theory is that it’s actually not that hugely uncommon of an experience: to be in a long, committed partnership and to have sexual droughts, or, even if you’re still having sex regularly, maybe it's just not that connected in the way that it used to be. There’s that whole lesbian-bed-death cliché, but I think this is something that can happen in any long partnership, gay or straight. 

Like I said, people seem really interested in this poem, and maybe it’s just that they can’t believe that someone would write it, would come out and say, “Hey, there have been periods of time when my wife and I have not had sex for a while.” Maybe in a sex-obsessed culture like the American one we live in now, where porn is on speed-dial for any twelve-year-old with a smartphone, it’s just incredible that anyone would admit to not having sex. But now I’m the one who’s curious about it: like, what is it about this poem that is speaking to people or, at the least, drawing their intense interest? It was not a fun poem for me to write. I was very ambivalent about publishing it in a magazine and made sure that it wouldn’t appear online. And I only put it in the book because I thought no one would notice it. There’s so much shame in our culture around not having sex. I mean, I wonder how many hits “how often should I be having sex?” gets on Google every day. It wasn’t something I was happy about in my life, and my wife certainly wasn’t happy about it either. Even now, I don’t have an understanding or an explanation for that period of time except that it was about me. I mean, I was depressed. But none of it was a clear line from cause to effect. Maybe people are interested in the poem the same way we stop to stare at the scene of a horrific accident: wow, what happened here and how can I keep it from happening to me? I don’t know. But I do know that the return to sex is incredible. That it’s like experiencing some kind of time warp or travel down a wormhole or the collapsing of time and distance in a flash because it’s like no time has passed at all. The return seems impossible and is then instantaneous. And the delight is so genuine and really surprising. And there is gratitude there—to be taken back to myself, to be delivered.

GGH: Outside of sex, the book seems preoccupied with relationships, in particular the ways they evolve or dissolve, but never lose their impact. “Love Letter to a Friend I Cannot Reach” is an example: what does it mean not just to be intimate with another person in some way, and to have that person leave your life, but never able to undo that intimacy that once was? “Getting Back Together,” as well, is a love poem from multiple angles of time: written to a lover who has returned, but who for some time was not present, and how to write into that absence as a reflection. Can you talk more about this preoccupation with timing that the poems have?

KK: Thank God those intimacies can’t dissolve, even though there are times when we so badly wish that they could. I’m so glad that they can’t. When there is a falling out or a misunderstanding, we want to say this other person is bad. But that’s not how being a human works. This is the wonderful gift of the passage of time. It’s the wonderful gift of the ability to reflect, and if I cut myself off, not only from the person, but also from the memories of that person—which means cutting myself off from the good stuff, too, the tenderness or the laughter or the companionship that worked when it did—then I cut myself off from the ability to reflect, and if I can’t reflect, I can’t grow. And what the fuck is the point of that?

I spent a lot of the first couple decades of my life trying to figure out what I could do to make the people around me behave differently or be the people that I wanted them to be. And then I realized that all of that power that I was trying to exert on others was power that I actually had the capability of exerting upon myself. That that would truly be the only way to have an effect on my life—and that it might be extremely satisfying to decide for myself who I would be with, and how I would be with them. That those were my real choices to make. There didn’t have to be, attached to those choices, a sense of powerlessness, blame, regret, fear, anger, distrust. And again, that’s the gift of time, which means reflection, gratitude, forgiveness, and grace.

GGH: “Lonely women make good lovers” takes its title from a line from a country song. Could you talk about this poem and its title, considering its status as the titular poem?

KK: It’s about a sexual encounter that’s fairly dissatisfying for both parties, and heavily influenced by the consumption of a massive amount of alcohol. I think it’s kind of a perfect example of what we were just talking about, which is that this wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing to me and I wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing to them either. It would have been a mistake to write the poem in a way that leaned into looking for blame rather than leaning into looking for an understanding of the human tragedy of mutual disconnection.

I wanted to write two people who are both good people just trying to briefly connect, for their own reasons, with another human being for one night, and the ways in which that can be fumbled so badly that the loneliness that we feel as a result is far more acute than if that connection had not been attempted at all.

The song “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers” is about how, if a woman is lonely and she doesn’t have a man, she will just be so grateful to get laid, especially if you give her a couple drinks. And it immediately made me think of the nights when I had been really lonely, and this was a night where I can’t speak for the other person, but for me, I was trying to fill a void of loneliness. I was trying to create one little hot ember to hold in my mind, in the midst of months of loneliness that I was experiencing at that time. And instead the opposite happened. I think that was probably an extremely lonely experience for the man that I was in bed with as well. That was not a moment of connection or satisfaction for anyone, no matter how badly we tried to make it be that. In the poem, I want to see each person as fully human, something that song has no interest in doing.

GGH: You end the collection with these lines: “When some people get married, / they’re making a pact with another person. // When I married you, I made a pact with the world. I live in it now, and refuse myself nothing.” I’m always curious by the words a poet chooses to end on, and these felt especially poignant to me with all that came before. Could you speak more on this poem, why this placement, why these lines to end on?

KK: Long-term partnership is an untapped and unexplored element in most art, and pop culture beyond. Film and television make it out to be as deadening and dreary as we all fear it could be. This kind of partnership being explored in an authentic way in art is something that we don't see enough of. What gets drowned out in the potential for those conversations are the ways in which the best kind of long-term partnership is the repetition of coming together and coming apart and coming together and coming apart, and what exists in the spaces of those things is the rest of the world. Not only is that coming together and that coming apart happening within the world, but it’s a dance that the world is a part of.

Going back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation, about the way that sex and sexuality are coexistent with the rest of our lives—I’m thinking about marriage and partnership in the same way. When I think about my marriage, I’m thinking about the way that my marriage exists within my family and within my friendships, and within all these other elements of my life and and within all the other ways in which I conduct myself in the world. So I want that simultaneity, and I want to believe that that kind of simultaneity actually makes me less isolated and more connected outside of my marriage as well. And that’s the whole book: being in relation, remembering ourselves and others together in the giant web, and loving that web.

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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.