All Its Charms

By Keetje Kuipers

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781942683773

Keetje Kuipers

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.

Book preview

Becoming

The streets were glass, the cars and salt-bellied

trucks slid across them—perfect pirouettes

just past the light’s red. Beyond my frosted

windshield were the animals, and beyond

the animals: silence, baled hay like spools

of thread scattered by a careless hand. In

the next season would I become just one

more hillside of purple vetch, unwanted

too-muchness sprung from a gravel pit’s mouth,

dead butterflies in my teeth? There were ten

thousand ditches where I could have lain my

body down. When I saw that early spring

meadowlark—one-winged, flapping in the road—

I pressed my heel to its chest, to the earth.

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.

The elk my father shot

is an imagined butterfly of flesh—

thin cannon bones pinning back its winged hide

like a boxed anartia amathea

amathea, all white speckled gristle

and silver tendon seam—when he calls me

from the mountaintop and leaves his breathless

message (afraid, at last, of what he’s done)

telling of the bow, the arrow, his tin

pan trembling heart and shaking arm, quiet

so as not to scare away the grazing

ghost he’s made, as if this yearly taking

of a life were a talisman carried

in his pocket beside the knife, a charm

against entropy, his own brittle bones.

The House on Fish Hatchery Road

When I see the neighbor’s kids playing kick-the-can, I know

it isn’t a can. Instead, some slim gift of faulty flesh

floats at the tips of their sneakers—squirrel? robin? I go

inside and stick the needle in my soft-soft belly,

count to ten as I push the plunger down. Outside

the bathroom window, the dog runs from leaf pile to leaf pile,

pissing his delight.

And on the neighbor’s picnic table

a green beer bottle sits in the sun, fat with unfinished

cigarettes. Someone’s peeled the label off all the way

around and left it there, wanting and half-full of