Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Or see the index
Beautiful in the Mouth was selected by Thomas Lux as winner of BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize and it debuted in the top ten on the Poetry Foundation bestseller list.
In it, Kuipers combines frank sensuality with sincere emotion, yielding poems that travel from New York City to the American West on a exploration of love and loss.
Set against both literal and figurative geography—the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside a logging town—these poems examine how loss transforms our most unwilling landscapes.
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.
Beautiful in the Mouth
(A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)
by Keetje Kuipers (Author),
Thomas Lux (Foreword)
Paperback
2010
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.; First Edition (April 1, 2010)
Language: English
Paperback: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1934414336
ISBN-13: 978-1934414330
$17.00
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Modern Poetry Archive, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, Kuipers, Keetje
One of Library Journal’s “Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014,” The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires.
With daring leaps and unflinching observations, these richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.
The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires.
Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.
(. . .) Shirtless
in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps,
they lie suspended. This is my one good
life—watching the exchange of embraces,
counting the faces assembled outside
the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by
the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock
of the gay couple’s hands, desperate clapping
of dark pigeons—who will take it from me?
(. . .)
Dolores Park (fragment)
A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Keetje Kuipers’s debut collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and is currently an assistant professor at Auburn University.
Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oregon Literary Arts.
In 2007 Keetje completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems previously published in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated seven years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje’s second book, The Keys to the Jail, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in the spring of 2014, and contains poems previously published in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, and the Indiana Review.
Keetje Kuipers was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2009-2011, and she was the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College from 2011-2012. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she lives with her family and their dog, Bishop (named after Elizabeth, of course).
Keetje Kuipers
Title: The Keys to the Jail
Poems
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
2014
Language: English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10: 1938160266
ISBN-13: 978-1938160264
$17.00
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Modern Poetry Archive, - Book News, - Bookstores, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, Kuipers, Keetje
A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity.
By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’s decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family—it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems: Beautiful in the Mouth, The Keys to the Jail, and, most recently, All Its Charms, which includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, a Bread Loaf fellow, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children on an island in the Salish Sea, a short ferry ride away from Seattle where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.
(. . .)
I climbed the red rocks robed in their red dust.
I put the earth—all its charms—within me,
into each waiting pocket. Lip and ear.
What will happen when my body can no longer
hold this fragrant salt, its hardened tears,
inside? Let mine into the dirt. The names
I’ve chosen for my children are already fast
across the sky like the ochre feathers that frame
the blackbird’s shrug.
(. . .)
Fragment of ‘Landscape with Sage and the Names of My Children’
All Its Charms
By: Keetje Kuipers
Language: English
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN-10: 1942683766
ISBN-13: 978-1942683766
Regular price $ 17.00
# new poetry
Keetje Kuipers:
All Its Charms
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book News, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, Kuipers, Keetje, MODERN POETRY
Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature