Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
It’s not easy being Keetje—so truthstakingly, heartgapingly, cliffedgingly vulnerable and live. The experience of her poetry feels dangerous, capable of triggering changes both lasting and longed for. That she recognizes love as “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves,” is as telling as anything you can know about her. The author of four collections of poetry, her work has appeared in more than one hundred magazines. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
I wasn’t trying to steal her boyfriend
and he wasn’t her boyfriend anyway. Just someone
beautiful she’d slept with once. I hadn’t yetlearned the difference between a shadow cast
in the shape of my desire and a contract a bodymakes with its own hunger. But I’d known beauty—
its currency, its power. So I wanted to sleepwith him, too. How I went about it wasn’t
that remarkable. I simply made myself appearto be a thing he’d want: not me, but something
I could easily be mistaken for, like a bird, say,pretending to be another bird. What I
craved from him was harder to cage. Beautiful,beautiful, I’d heard people praised all my life.
Not the bird at all—just the flutter that it raised.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
