The Keys to the Jail

by Keetje Kuipers

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938160264
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #142
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the Universityof Oregon. She has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oregon Literary Arts.

In 2007 Keetje completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon's Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems previously published in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated seven years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje’s second book, The Keys to the Jail, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in the spring of 2014, and contains poems previously published in American Poetry Review, Jubilat, and the Indiana Review.

Keetje was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford Universityfrom 2009-2011, and she was the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College from 2011-2012. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Auburn Universitywhere she lives with her family and their dog, Bishop (named after Elizabeth, of course).

Table of Contents

Goodbye Is Forever

Another Time, Another Place 13

Wolf Season 14

Our Last Vacation 15

If One of Us Can't Live Like This 16

In a Sentimental Mood 17

Lover Long Gone 18

Dear John Letter, Never Sent 19

Stowaway Future 20

Thief, Thief

The Extinct 23

Sometimes a Season Changes Overnight 24

Just Outside 25

Brotherhood 26

Getting Over the Future 27

What I Thought Then 28

Traces of the Imperfectly Erased 29

In Medias Res 30

Warning Posted at the Marin Headlands: People Have Been Swept from the Cliffs and Drowned 31

All the Rivers in the World 32

The Open Spaces 33

A Year of Rain

The Keys to the Jail 37

Birthday Poem 38

Letter to an Inmate in Solitary Confinement 39

The Ocean 40

Melancholy 41

The Loneliness 42

Too Many Bridges 43

Overwinter 44

Please Check Under the Bed 45

Bees, And Other Dead Things Found in Winter 46

Every Bright Thing 47

Drought 48

Five Women Ending in a Flower

I The Girl 51

II The Older Woman 53

III The Whore 54

IV The Femme 55

V The Wife 56

Poison on the Street

Doe Gun Lake 59

Speaking as the Male Poet 60

For All the Dead Lovelies 61

I Will Away 62

The Oar 63

Abstinence 64

Sick Days 65

Perfect Crime 66

I Wasn't Searching for a New Language, But a New Meaning 67

Some Advice

At the Museum of Modern Art 71

Cold Comfort in October 72

Entreaty 73

Some Advice for Both of Us 74

Applied Science 75

Dolores Park 76

The Doctor 77

The Story 78

Ought 79

Something with a Heart in It 80

A Beautiful Night for the Rodeo 81

Jonathan Plays in the Key of E 82

Acknowledgments 84

About the Author 87

Colophon 92

Editorial Reviews

04/28/2014
Love lost, love almost lost, landscapes explored (especially those of the mountain West), sex imagined, and sex enjoyed all play their parts in this strongly felt, if sometimes talky, second effort from Kuipers (Beautiful in the Mouth). Never coy about her symbols, she decides “The ocean is a fist, inside of which I/ am allowed to be heartbroken,” while elsewhere (in a persona poem called “The Femme”) “I want to transgress the halls of sex,/ eat the filter on the cigarette.” Her poems about love between women can be her strongest, and her identities complex: “I’ll keep wanting it all: every man/ and woman I meet,” a not-quite-sonnet promises. Short sentences alternate with longer self-explanations, never abstruse, sometimes obvious, but sometimes wise. Kuiper divides her time between Alabama and Montana, and both the warm South and the cold forests enter her work: more than in her debut, though, 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.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

One 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

From the Publisher