Keetje Kuipers with James Allen Hall and Cate Lycurgus: Lonely Women Make..

Come on out to Bird in Hand to celebrate Keetje Kuipers' new poetry collection with a festive reading! James Allen Hall and Cate Lycurgus will join Kuipers for a night of poems in the spirit of her new collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers-- a daring, sexy, embodied, earthy book of love poems.

Engaging a poetics of humility, these unforgettable poems lean into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” In this queer and complicated new book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire, finding compromise in a body reborn through love.

We hope you'll join us!

Order LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS here

Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poems is Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She lives in Montana and is Editor of Poetry Northwest.

James Allen Hall is the author of three books, most recently a poetry collection, Romantic Comedy (Four Way, 2023), and a collection of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (Cleveland State, 2017). They’ve received awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent work appears in Copper Nickel, Best American Poetry 2025, the 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. With the poet Aaron Smith they co-host Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast.

Cate Lycurgus’s writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Orion and elsewhere. Her chapbook Seacliff is forthcoming from Bull City Press in Fall 2025. Cate lives in San Jose, California, where she interviews for 32 Poems and teaches writing.

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