The Keys to the Jail

By Keetje Kuipers

The Keys to the Jail is Keetje Kuipers' long-awaited second collection

Keetje Kuipers' work is accessible, emotional, and honest

The poems of this new collection engage musicality and lyricism, making use of subtle form (pantoums)

Offers a behind-the-scenes look at female anger, self-accusation, and the constant search for fault when something is lost

A long-needed new perspective on loss (continuing and going beyond Elizabeth Bishop's "art of losing"), which focuses more on the transgressive act of anger than character redemption and forgiveness

Prize-winning author (Beautiful in the Mouth won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize)

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938160271

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

Goodbye Is Forever

Another Time, Another Place

The misplacing heart tries to make nuthatch

overlay cardinal—gray bird on red.

We don’t just forget the words for love, we

forget what they mean. And so how are you

and I to know each other now, friend? Two

sprinklers going off in the dark. It’s not

the mask of distance that separates us,

but something like the need I feel for those

girls naked under their dresses, kneecaps

like soft button mushrooms. Goodbye, place name:

you three-legged dog, your fog-pour mouth. Who

would believe my newfound devotion for

you? It’s my hand reaching into the past

and plucking that one tooth that aches with age.

Wolf Season

My past apart from yours is a landscape

governed by false erasure of snow:

fence-lines pin drifts in their barbed hold,

animals abandon their tracks behind them.

This is why I tire so easily in your presence.

Your press is the weight of so much crushing

touch that’s come before, each layer

half-melted and refrozen above me.

Even in this unfamiliar city—odd to us as soap

passed between tongues, where the radio tower tilts

like a lost ship’s mast, the train rounding

each corner one section at a time, body trailing

somewhere behind the head—I’m sealed

beneath. Your naked back bent over

the wilderness of bathroom tiles as you

wash yourself at my sink is last winter’s

buffalo turned from me and halted in the snow.

In that country I left behind, they’re hunting wolves.

What never changes feels most new—

your hand on my wrist, the sound of a gun.

Our Last Vacation

It was the season of dead moles,

black silken pelts like evening purses

abandoned along the forest path.

We collected mushrooms on a charred hillside,

smudged ourselves in soot, marveled

at the way bones crumble when they’ve been

burned, then played Keno in a bar

where spent chainsaws, those chewed teeth,

hung from the ceiling while we listened

to your father’s wife describe her time at the slots:

cherry, cherry, cherry, pineapple. We met a man

who owns a mortuary and we shook his hand.

You said geese mate for life, so if you shot one,

you’d have to shoot them both. The leaves

kept coming down, knotting the air into thin

ropes of light, spinning their green palms

like wide roulette wheels on the river’s muddy face.

The odometer’s dials turned over and over,

just like they do in ambulances. I told you I thought

we’d know when it was time to go home.

If One of Us Can’t Live Like This

We might be unhappy for the rest

of our lives. It’s not inconceivable—

the skiff of dust on your hands, the slow

smelting of years. How would I know

if you call me darling in your sleep?

A promise is a train lying in a field

for decades: we take pictures of the weeds

that flower around it and talk about the days

when it arrived with a whistle of steam.

In a Sentimental Mood

We ate an orange, a tangerine, really.

He described his mouth as a coastal