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.""
