“Book Descriptions: 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.
We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,
the dart of fish faint at our ankles, each shuttered BBQ shack a kudzu flash
in my side mirror. Pleasure has become the itch of a mosquito bite between
my shoulders, and your rough thumb on my thigh a tickle gentle as turtles bobbing
in Sea-Doo oil slick and cellophane scraps. How many years did I suffer the loves
that gave too much freedom and not enough tenderness? Let me be like the man we
saw outside of Notasulga, hands cuffed behind his back, cigarette in his mouth,
and you be the sheriff, leaning in close, cupping the sweet flame to my waiting face.” DRIVE
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