Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewOne of Library Journal's "Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014" "Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas." --Tracy K. Smith "Quietly ferocious, The Keys to the Jail is full of love and after-love poems that come clad with 'bell[ies] of rusted steel.' These poems are not afraid to feel, not afraid of desire or beauty or the inevitability of their respective undoings, not afraid 'to eat the filter on the cigarette.' Yet there is such generosity here in the 'repenned' landscape -- out among the wolves and ghosts, the rodeo queens and Dairy Queens --that we are allowed to glean from hunger, a form of contentment, and still welcome the cavernous desire for more." --Elyse Fenton "In these poems, longing is only shaped like emptiness, but really is filled with everything one might reach toward or put their mouth to as they sate themselves on desire. The Keys to the Jail are what they promise to be, an opening of the dark rooms within us, not to escape but to enter, to let the eyes adjust and learn to see what bright wants exist there." --Natalie Diaz "As a whole, the poems in The Keys to the Jail are bittersweet and tenderly defiant. As art, these poems both estrange and fulfill us. They leave us aching with the desire to overcome the want and sadness of the darker aspects of existence." -The Journal "Kuipers is a keeper ... Readers will feel the impassioned yet controlled energy that is lifted from these poems; fearless and possessing a precise sense of timing, -Kuipers's work keeps us reading." -The Library Journal Her poems about love between women can be her strongest, and her identities complex ... her sense of place serves her sense of how people behave. Fans of Mark Doty, or of Eavan Boland will find a lot here to like, especially once they get past the predictable breakup poems, into the verse about self-discovery, lust pursued or affection found, where the poet exclaims, 'hope is the saddest/ secret of all: Please, be wild for me.'"-Publishers Weekly
Table of ContentsContents
Goodbye Is Forever
Another Time, Another Place 1
Wolf Season 2
Our Last Vacation 3
If One of Us Can’t Live Like This 4
In a Sentimental Mood 5
Lover Long Gone 6
Dear John Letter, Never Sent 7
Stowaway Future 8
Thief, Thief
The Extinct 10
Sometimes a Season Changes Overnight 11
Just Outside 12
Brotherhood 14
Getting Over the Future 15
What I Thought Then 16
Traces of the Imperfectly Erased 17
In Medias Res 18
Warning Posted at the Marin Headlands:
People Have Been Swept from the Cliffs and Drowned 19
All the Rivers in the World 20
The Open Spaces
A Year of Rain
The Keys to the Jail 22
Birthday Poem 23
Letter to an Inmate in Solitary Confinement 24
The Ocean 26
Melancholy 27
The Loneliness 29
Too Many Bridges 30
Overwinter 31
Please Check Under the Bed 32
Bees, And Other Dead Things Found in Winter 33
Every Bright Thing 34
Drought 35
Five Women Ending in a Flower
I. The Girl 37
II. The Older Woman 39
III. The Whore 40
IV. The Femme 42
V. The Wife 44
Poison on the Street
Dog Gun Lake 47
Speaking as the Male Poet 48
For All the Dead Lovelies 49
I Will Away 50
The Oar 51
Abstinence 53
Sick Days 54
Perfect Crime 55
I Wasn’t Searching for a New Language, But a New Meaning 56
Some Advice
At the Museum of Modern Art 58
Cold Comfort in October 59
Entreaty 60
Some Advice for Both of Us 61
Applied Science 62
Dolores Park 63
The Doctor 64
The Story 66
Ought 67
Something with a Heart in It 68
A Beautiful Night for the Rodeo 69
Jonathan Plays in the Key of E 70
