Keetje Kuipers’s fourth poetry collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions, 2025), is a passionate exploration of the self—in all its forms—in relation to the world. A wife’s pregnant body receives tender adoration alongside praise for the natural, writhing outdoors. The gentle ministrations of parenthood stand against the sizzling eroticism of the past and present. Where love and loneliness collide, there is also gratitude for those who Kuipers says “won’t speak my name, but I’m so grateful they touched my life in profound ways.”
Keetje Kuipers is editor of Poetry Northwest and a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. She lives in Montana with her wife and children. Lonely Women Make Good Lovers won the 2025 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Kuipers and I first met last year during our residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where her poems enthralled me during a public reading. We connected via Zoom in the lead-up to her book’s release about subverting the concept of the love poem, romance, and the relationship between nature and queerness.
DW McKinney: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is your fourth poetry collection. What was the inspiration for it?
Keetje Kuipers: There are a couple poems from the last book, after the book was published, where I was like, “Oh, these poems belong in the next collection.” I had some poems about my wife, especially at the end of that book, that were complicated: love poems that were kind of ugly. Not love poems that were like “love is so nice and sweet” and all of that stuff. There were also poems in the last collection that were about the limits of empathy and compassion. I feel like they were bridge poems where I was beginning to write about vulnerability, love, compassion, sympathy, and empathy. It was about acknowledging and trying not to hide the limitations and the failures of the self when it comes to loving family, friends, partners, our children, the world. That’s where this fourth book fully moved into.
DWM: The book’s title comes from the Freddy Weller song of the same name. I listened to the song for the first time while reading your poems. How did you think to bring the lyrics into the collection?
KK: I love listening to country. My wife and I think it’s this subversive act as queer women to listen to country music, from bro country to older stuff. This song came on my favorite station, “The Ranch,” and I had never heard the song before. The lyrics are basically about how these women are so sad and desperate and longing for any kind of touch or affection that they will be all over you. Anything you want to do, they’re down for because they’re desperate and they’re hungry. Once they have a couple drinks, it’s all good. I was like, “This is the most horrifying song I’ve ever heard.” I immediately started thinking about all the times that I had been a lonely female lover and how it was not hot. It did not feel good. It was not sexy. Those were not my proudest moments. Those were not my most delighted moments. Those were the saddest fucking experiences of my life, in many ways. I wanted to write the accurate counterpart to that misogynistic song.
DWM: You’re reclaiming that lyric. You’re reclaiming what it means to be a lonely woman.
KK: A lot of the book is reclamation. Sometimes it’s reclaiming a moment of shame, which can be like the shame of sadness and loneliness. There’s also the shame of having failed a friend. Friendship is a really important element in the book, too. Donika Kelly, when she was here in Missoula reading the other night, talked about friendships. We chatted about how there aren’t enough friendship poems. Being a friend is hard, and then writing about being a friend is really hard because it’s like a failing endeavor. No matter how much you love someone, you’re going to get it wrong. You’re going to put your foot in your mouth. You’re going to fail to be there when somebody needs you. Those are all things that are going to happen and yet, the depths of connection that are possible and the gifts that you can give as a friend are so worth the risks of all those failures.
I reached out to this college friend who I’m still in touch with, peripherally, and I said to them, “There’s this poem in the book about stealing your boyfriend,” and they didn’t even remember that incident. They said, “It’s all good. I love you.” But I was such an asshole. And I sit with it and live with it all the time. It crosses my mind out of the blue all the time, what a total asshole I was. Of course, they’re over it; they’re good. They made peace with that and with me a long time ago. But those wounds for ourselves, when we know we could have been a better version of ourselves, they’ll stay forever.
DWM: It’s interesting when we have those moments where we realize that wound may be festering. You present it to someone else, and they have no idea what you’re talking about. You have to reckon with that idea that it’s not something that you just created. The impact is just different for other people.
KK: There’s another poem in the book called “Walking Lessons” that’s about a dear old friend of mine from graduate school. It’s about the body and how we see ourselves and how we see others as we move through the world. The poem takes the reader through a moment when I failed to see this friend and failed to have a fully realized compassion around that act of seeing her. I talked to her about that poem before it came out in a magazine, and I started by saying, “Well, I wrote this poem about you.”
But then I was like, no, I wrote this poem about me. So, here I am engaging in this self-centered act, which is like dealing with my own wound. It’s recounting a moment when I wounded her, and so I’m now doubling down on hurting her, even by writing about it and reengaging with it. But again, the best thing that I can do in this moment is acknowledge that this is not even about her. She is a casualty in my act of trying to learn not to be a dick. I’ve got to do that work too. It’s endless work.
DWM: You dedicated quite a few of your poems to different people. Were you trying to honor them? Or were you trying to heal wounds?
KK: Yes, I was honoring and reclaiming and giving a genuine nod of gratitude to say, “You taught me something.” When we talk about who inspires us to write our poems, who informs the writing of our poems, I think about all these former lovers who I’m not in touch with anymore. They changed me, and not only when we loved each other, but after we stopped loving each other. They’ve continued to change the way that I think about the world and my place in it.
DWM: Another act of love is to acknowledge that even though you may not have this relationship with those people anymore, you can still acknowledge the impact they had on your life.
KK: I did an interview the other day for a podcast and the podcaster asked me, “Who taught you how to love?” I promptly burst into tears and gave some blubbering answer. I was like, “Why am I crying? Why am I answering this so poorly? What is the answer to this question?”
Then I went home, I thought about it, and I realized it was because I actually don’t think I’m very good at loving. I actually don’t think I’ve learned that lesson particularly well. It’s still something I’m trying to get better at. I’m trying to let the world teach me, when there is an opportunity to learn, how to love better. I want to step into it rather than away from it. It makes me cry because it’s scary and because I’m ashamed of the ways in which I fail at it.
DWM: But would you consider yourself to be romantic?
KK: I think one of the things I’ve realized recently is that I am not the same person that I used to be. There’s always been something wonderfully comforting about imagining that I am the same person that I’ve always been. But actually, it’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve been able to reconnect to that romantic person I used to be. I don’t mean romantic as in candlelight dinners. I mean romantic as in embracing romance in the world. That’s a part of me that used to be much larger and more dominant and more open. Some of what I’ve experienced in my adult life has taken romance from me and shut me down to that. So part of it is getting back to a person and a place in myself, and reclaiming and reconciling myself in this book. Humility is a big part of these poems. The poems in this book helped me see how far I still have to go.
DWM: The blurbs for your book and other reviews categorically call the collection “sexy” or say it’s about “love poems.” We often think about love as hearts in your eyes, but the collection isn’t always about that. There are hard truths alongside self-love. How would you describe your book? Is it more than just love poems?
KK: It’s hard to see your work for yourself. When I was talking to my press about this book, and talking to my publicist about this book, I really wanted to lean into the parts of it that were sexy and the parts of it that were love poems. I wanted that to be what this book is, and I told the person who took my headshot for the back of the book that I wanted a sexy headshot. So I was just wearing a shirt and no pants. Ultimately, I think sexiness is present in a lot of these poems, but the part that touched me the most, and where I felt really seen, was when Donika Kelly said: “Recognition of the self, of others, Kuipers shows us, is a practice.” I feel like that is what the book is really about.
The book is sexy in the way that my therapist said that the greatest adventure is inside of a marriage. It isn’t in open relationships and threesomes, swapping partners and all of that. That’s less dangerous in a lot of ways. It’s dangerous and scary to pick a person and stay. The adventure is in all the risks that are inherent for the self, in having to face how hard love is and in having to discover all of the scary places in yourself in order to be with one person. I feel like that’s the book. The book is the inside of a marriage. It’s all the scary stuff where you have to recognize yourself, and you have to recognize who you’re with.
DWM: I was really happy to see the poems “Now that we’ve been married all these years,” and “Greek Chorus” in the collection. They were the ones that you workshopped and read at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during our residency last year. I remember you researching Saturn raining diamonds for that one line and how arousing “Greek Chorus” was.
KK: I think I wrote “Now that we’ve been married all these years,” at the VCCA, if I remember correctly. It was one of the last poems to go into the book, and then it ended up being the actual last poem that appears in the book. It’s such a love poem, and it’s a perfect example of one of those love poems that’s painful and messy. It’s not a hearts-in-the-eyes kind of a thing.
DWM: Someone asked me this question a few weeks ago, so I’m going to ask it to you. How do you reconcile being a mother with the work that you write? Do you feel self-conscious about what your kids are going to read? Eventually they’re probably going to read it.
KK: I have this 12-year-old. She’s not on social media, but some of her friends are, and they follow me. I’ve had to hide my social media profile from them because I have a public profile, and because I’m posting all these poems that I just don’t want to have to explain to them. I don’t want to be driving them to swim in the carpool and have them be like, “My God! This woman with the crazy hair and the sweatpants wrote that masturbation poem. Gross!” Those parts of my life do not need to intersect.
I sat down with my daughter recently, and was like, “I just want you to know what’s in this new book.” She’s picked it up and read some of it at this point. I was really nervous about my wife reading this book. I don’t share my work with her, generally. Not because I’m trying to keep it from her, but because it’s not part of our relationship. We get different things from different people. I don’t need to get that from my wife. So she read the book recently, and afterwards, she was like, “It’s great. Don’t be worried.” She also said that it’s true, but it’s also not true. The poems, even though they’re autobiographical, even though they are true—are more true in some ways than the poems in my first book where I took a lot more liberties with the organization of facts and things like that—my wife said that there’s so much more to us and to our relationship that isn’t in this book. This is just tiny, little slivers of things. She said, “I don’t care if people know about those slivers. It’s more important to me that we protect the larger things for ourselves.”
DWM: You interweave nature through many of the poems. Nature can be a mirror for queerness and its complexities. How has nature played a role in demonstrating your queer identity in your love poems?
KK: There was an essay in Orion magazine years ago about queering ecology. I’ve been teaching it in my writing classes forever. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Living in Montana, where we live so much of our lives outside in “wild spaces,” and having done some of the most important and intensive writing of my life in these “wild spaces,” it’s inevitable that I’m going to engage with the natural world in my work.
Engaging with the ecological is a great way to engage with queerness. It’s also a great way to screw with gender. In all my books, the natural world has been a site of metaphorical possibility and even narrative possibility. What can happen in this space that can’t happen in our more human space? I love teaching Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild and everything that he says about the ways in which we in Western culture insist on separation. These are the human spaces, and then we go out into the wild spaces. We try to separate ourselves from the wild spaces and admire them. We other them and we other the animals and all those things. Again, that’s a great space to think about gender and to think about queerness.
DWM: How you wrote about gender in the book felt like a very quiet note. There was one lyric in “Spa Days” that stands out, where you write, “I was always trying to fuck my way / towards the woman I believed was hidden / inside each one of them.”
KK: I grew up in a house where dinner table conversation was often about gender. My mom was a professor of sociology, and a lot of the work she did was around gender. So I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about gender that got deep inside myself as a young person. Then I went out into the world with them, only having a sense of a fraction of what I had absorbed. The rest of it? I really didn’t understand what I believed and thought about gender and how I lived my life related to those ideas.
It can be comfortable writing a poem to lean into persona elements or less complicated ideas about sex and gender. Those can be really comfortable spaces to write poems that people think are sexy and daring, like a BDSM poem or something like that. Actually it’s scarier and more challenging and more complicated to write the poem where it’s not that easy, where those roles don’t fall along easily definable and identifiable lines. Where, rather than finding comfort in role play, we find role play to be hard and confusing. It offers chances for discovery, but it also offers opportunities to elide things about ourselves that are true and that we should instead be honoring.