Keetje Kuipers’s collection Lonely Women Make Good Lovers is filled with love poems that startle with their intimacy and impact.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Kuipers’s wickedly erotic and ingenious fourth collection (after All Its Charms) explores identity and how the body is invested with meaning that is continuously shifting.”
In her own words, here is Keetje Kuipers‘s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Lonely Women Make Good Lovers:
Before I came into writing, I started out in college as a music major with an emphasis in vocal performance. When I look back on my youthful and misguided dream of being a musician, I can see now that the two things which most drew me to singing were the lyrics that I got to feel inside my own body as they came out of my mouth and the connective thrill of performance that allowed me to move those words from my body into another’s through their ears. Even though I eventually realized that composing the words myself and delivering them through brain (rather than bodily) transmission on the page was more fulfilling for me, I still love to sing. Belting along to songs in my car is how I’ve been figuring my own shit out for almost thirty years. And despite the fact that I can’t write poems with any music—even instrumental music—playing in the background, I’ve often found that singing along to something twangy that’s playing in my car almost inevitably makes me pull to the side of the road to jot down some words of my own. The poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers started with that kind of moment of musical inspiration, and they’ve been carried along by the repeated companionship of musical artists trying to work their shit out, too: vulnerable, raw, and singing their guts out.
Steve Wariner: “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers”
I am an unabashed fan of country music, and I’m not talking about that hip alt-country stuff. I like the songs that get played on the radio, from weepy country classics to upbeat bro-country. There’s something delightfully subversive about being a queer woman who enjoys turning up the dial on that kind of all-American sound that in so many ways might want to culturally shut me out or put me down. Reclamation—of the self, of the body, of our complicated identities as we move through a world that wants to simplify us—is a big theme in the poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. And when I listen to country on the radio station, I feel like I’m doing some of that reclaiming in real time. But even I balked when I first heard Steve Wariner sing this song, which is so insulting to women it’s almost hard to believe you’re hearing the lyrics right. I immediately felt compelled to write a poem—a whole book of them, in fact—refuting our powerlessness.
Joseph: “Waves Crash”
I don’t use the word “worth” in any of the poems in the book, but notions of worth—especially a woman’s worth as it relates to beauty, femininity, youth, and sex—are a major theme. When I first heard the line, “And if I’m not what I produce or make / Or how I make someone feel / What the hell am I?” in this song, I promptly burst into tears. Who hasn’t doubted how they measure up, especially in our contemporary culture of selfies and vacation snaps, in a world that tells women they can do anything without acknowledging that we’re expected to do everything. The fact that the band Joseph is comprised of three sisters who harmonize their way through this tortured self-loathing only makes the song all that more potent.
Indigo Girls: “All that We Let In”
At the heart of LWMGL is vulnerability: how we crave it from others but also shrink from its display, how we guard against exposing it in ourselves while also wanting to deploy it like a bomb. For the thirty years I’ve been listening to the Indigo Girls, one of my favorite things about their music is the way they explore vulnerability—not its posture or performance, which can look like shouting all your darkest secrets from the rooftop, but its actual quiet uncertainty, its questions, its never knowing if “we’re better off for all that we let in.” Their songs are also consistently political in a way that’s intimate and domestic. The moments in this song where a woman is knitting a sweater, cooking supper on the stove, or writing a poem and leaving it on the windshield of a truck show the fight that can reside inside of acts of vulnerability and care. They make me want to work harder to let the world in, even when it hurts me to do so.
Tracy Grammer: “Blue Wing”
Ballads are one of the oldest known forms of English language poetry, and existed originally as a way to memorize stories—thanks to their easy-to-follow rhyme scheme—and share them across communities. Tracy Grammer’s version of this contemporary ballad is set in the landscapes of rural eastern Washington, where I was born, and the character at the heart of the song experiences exile, incarceration, addiction, and deep loneliness. Ultimately, though, the chorus tempers these themes by reminding us of the freedom of the soul—a concept that can be hard for any of us to hold onto in the world today. I believe in the powerful accessibility of storytelling as an art form, and this song is a perfect example of the way we depend on narrative to make sense of our lives, which is always what I’m trying to do in my poems.
Jelly Roll: “Son of a Sinner”
I’ve written in in this book and others about my cousin, Julie, who died as a result of her long-term struggle with an addiction to opioids. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be done writing about the incredibly sweet girl I knew growing up and the tragedy of what her life became before it ended. Jelly Roll has some of the best songs I’ve ever heard that delve into addiction and examine the humanness of that battle: just a regular, mixed-up, imperfect person, like we all are, singing, “I’m only one drink away from the devil / I’m only one call away from home / Yeah, I’m somewhere in the middle / I guess I’m just a little right and wrong.” We all wish Julie had called home that night.
The Highwomen: “Highwomen”
In 1986, Johnny, Waylon, Willie, and Kris recorded their hit version of “Highwayman,” a song about a highwayman who is reincarnated as a sailor, construction worker on the Hoover Dam, and, finally, the captain of a starship “across the universe divide.” It’s a great recording, but I prefer the 2019 all-women adaptation by Brandi Carlile and Amanda Shires, and sung by Carlile, Shires, Yola, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Sheryl Crow. This revamped version recasts the reincarnation trope as empowering and intersectional, and places an emphasis on the enduring value of women’s stories over time. A lot of the poems in my book are about the limits of compassion and empathy, as well as how much can be gained by attempting the hard work of thinking outside ourselves. I like poems that encourage me to understand my small place as one woman among many women, and this song does just that.
Eric Church: “Give Me Back My Hometown”
Nostalgia, regret, and reclamation of the choices we’ve made—good and bad—are themes that consistently run through the poems in LWMGL. My speakers wrestle with the past and with their inability to sometimes fully own it. This song is about a breakup that makes the speaker feel as if he’s lost his hometown because it’s now tainted with the memory of a broken relationship. Whenever I hear it, I’m reminded of the ways we can lose some of the most potent talismans of self—place being one of the biggest—if we insist on privileging smaller memories of pain or cruelty over the larger ones of joy and gratitude. I’ve lost touch with so many friends and lovers over the years, but I want the work of my heart to be about what we had together then and not what we don’t have now. Sure, I can blame myself. And I can blame them. Or I can feel grateful for what we once shared.
Miranda Lambert: “If I Was a Cowboy”
I needed a new author photo for the book’s jacket, and ended up getting to do a shoot with photographer Beowulf Sheehan in New York. Beowulf asked me for two things in preparation for our session: a playlist for him to put on while we worked in the studio and some “inspiration photos” to guide him towards the aesthetic I was going for. I promptly sent him a GQ cover shot of Ryan Gosling wearing a pink duster and a look of smoldering, High Noon-style desire. I don’t think Beowulf and his assistant had ever heard a single song on my playlist, which was heavily dominated by current female country singers, but they gamely bopped along to gender-bending, self-myth-making tunes like this one while I did my best impression of a hot gunslinger (which is an impression I’m trying to do in some of my poems, too).
Keetje Kuipers’s most recent collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Poems from her three previous collections have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, POETRY, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.