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. Dolores Park In the flattening California dusk, women gather under palms with their bags of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered with the trash of the day, paper napkins blowing across the legs of those who still drown on a patchwork of blankets. 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? 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.

"A precise and elegant look at motherhood, love, and what it means to live." -Seattle Met 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' 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.

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.
From Devils Lake Journal:
"Keetje Kuipers' "Beautiful in the Mouth" is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker's own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as "Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer" alongside "Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage," "Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar," and "Barn Elegy" with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets."
From ForeWord Reviews:
"The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, "a wave as well as a particle.""

The Dionysus issue of Pantheon Magazine brings forth the resentments of the past, the madness of the present, and, finally, the future of letting go. A pair find themselves outside the city limits to nowhere, a team of researchers find mystery and beauty in the Kahllian Dome-Plains, and a man whose palate craves the most exotic cuts of meat battles the phantoms of a previous life. These stories and more in this collection inspired by Dionysus, god of wine, ecstasy, and ritual madness.