All Its Charms
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This third collection from Kuipers (The Keys to the Jail) opens with an articulate longing: "Every birth even the wings/ of the caddis lifting from the river// is a shroud a momentary hunger." The speaker's desire to bear a child entwines with the landscape of her abandoned home, a gorgeously described panorama of accidental and intentional death, from a father's annual hunting slaughter, to children who play kick the can with roadkill. When this "hunger" takes root in a real pregnancy, we learn that the father has been chosen "from a list of hair/ and eye color, narrowing the field by height// and weight and college major." Married love comes later and completes the family, as she writes in "Shooting Clay Pigeons After the Wedding": "the truck's tracks behind/ us like the drag of our twin wedding trains." This poem's eloquent final image, a skeet-shooting bride with "that new/ muscle near my heart," characteristically slams the poem shut. As the speaker moves through the fears of new mothers into the thick of parenthood, she finds that she can't fall back on the former driver of her art: "Sadness is so much work. Angry takes too much/ time." A story of birth and rebirth is not a new story, nor is it always charming. That, perhaps, is its biggest charm.
