Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers, which will be published by BOA Editions on April 8, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with. In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.
Here is the cover, designed by Sandy Knight, art by Vivian Greven:
Author Keetje Kuipers: “If you’ve ever had sex in front of a mirror, you know that the sex you’re having in your mind is often not the sex you find yourself having in your reflection. The wet mouths, the quiver of flesh—sometimes it’s less sexy than you thought, and sometimes it’s actually a whole lot hotter. Locating the equivalence between the inside and the outside can be a gymnastics of the mind (not just of the sweaty body), and book covers can work the same way: what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside are very much in the eye of the beholder.
My new collection of poems, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, is, for me, a deeply sexy book. And while it deals in plenty of themes that wander far beyond the bounds of the bedroom—including forgiveness, humility, and grief—more than anything else it is an embodied book. So I wanted an embodied cover to go with it, something female-forward, sensual without being clichéd, sexy without being porn.
But finding a piece of art that felt both embodied and also subversive, playful, and empowered quickly revealed itself to be an impossible task. Every image I found either objectified the bodies it contained or attempted to undercut their sensuality with violence. There were cherries popping from full lips, bondage scenes, and what looked like nude robots wearing stilettos—it was essentially a collection of all the tropes I had tried to craft my poems to push against.
Luckily, a friend pointed me towards a series of paintings by the German artist Vivian Greven, whose Greco-Roman sculpture-influenced work is often rendered with the crispness of a photograph and the electricity level of a live power line. As described on her website, Greven’s paintings ‘transcend traditional depictions of intimacy by capturing the vulnerability of metamorphosis.’ Whether writing about death, love, shame, or sex, this excavation of vulnerability—and its ability to change us—is always what I hope my poems are working towards.
And part of the vulnerability of metamorphosis is in the question of what we’re willing to reveal in that moment of change—both to others and to ourselves. As I write in the book, ‘I hadn’t yet / learned the difference between a shadow cast / in the shape of my desire and the contract a body / makes with its own hunger.’ BOA book designer Sandy Knight got this instantly, and designed a cover around Greven’s ‘) ( XI’ that balances the earthy embodiment present in my poems with the simultaneous neon glow of self-revelation. The completed cover for Lonely Women Make Good Lovers honors how difficult it is to reconcile how we see ourselves inside and outside, and to not only feel but allow ourselves to witness the shudder of one body’s need pressed up against another’s.”
