What happens when the things we care for-children, lovers, parents, dreams, homes-are taken away? What populates our landscapes and how do we perceive those objects? In her debut collection of poems, Beautiful in the Mouth, Keetje Kuipers attempts to answer these questions. Written over the course of five years and a geographic journey spanning Paris to New York to Oregon, Kuipers' poems examine contemporary female loss in terms of literal and figurative geography: the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside of a logging town. From her own unique perspective, Kuipers continues in the spirit of poets like Elizabeth Bishop to examine how loss forces itself upon unwilling landscapes and how those landscapes must alter to receive that loss. Paul Scot August, a Milwaukee-area poet, will open for Ms. Kuipers.
Author bio: Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Kuipers is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She splits her time between Missoula, MT and Palo Alto, CA.
Paul Scot August is a past poetry editor of The Cream City Review, and was a columnist for several years at North Western Lines Magazine, a Railroad Historical Society publication. His poems have appeared in Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, The Cream City Review, Passages North, Scribble Magazine, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere. He lives in Wauwatosa with his two kids.
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