All Its Charms (American Poets Continuum, 171) - Softcover

Kuipers, Keetje

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942683766 ISBN 13: 9781942683766

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 2019

Synopsis

“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.

About this title

About the Author

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and All Its Charms (2019). Kuipers’ poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Best American Poetry, Narrative, American Poetry Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of fellowships from the Lucas Artist Residency, the Jentel Artist Residency Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Kuipers lives with her wife and daughter on an island in the Salish Sea, where she is a faculty member at Seattle’s Hugo House and Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Landscape with Sage and the Names of My Children

I picked all the flowers, I palmed all the stones.

I dropped the nameless insects onto my tongue
and felt their black wings unfurl. I held the dead

buck by his antlers and dragged him through the sage,

brought my teeth to the tender bridge of ribs and fed
until the glossy maggots overtook me.

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. There is no such thing

as a scar, no matter how much I want

to be one. Every birth―even the wings
of the caddis lifting from the river

in a shroud―a momentary hunger.

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942683766
• ISBN 13: 9781942683766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112