Keetje Kuipers and Daisy Atterbury discuss their new books, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA Editions 2025) and The Kármán Line (Rescue Press 2024), traversing country music, queer confessionals and pickup trucks. Both writers traffic in the mythic, the embodied, and the intimate, plumbing the emotional terrain of queer desire. Lonely Women and The Kármán Line treat place not as backdrop, but as an emotional architecture. In this wandering conversation, Kuipers explores place as mutable, shaped by memory’s erosion and accumulation. Atterbury considers how desire distorts geography, pulling focus, bending light, and making terrain shimmer with the gravity of longing. The conversation arcs across distances—geographic, generational, and psychic.
Daisy Atterbury: Keetje, I loved your book, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers! So, let’s start with a little country music. In The Kármán Line, I quote Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise”: “Baby, you’re a song / You make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise.” And in your book, you invoke another country song—Steve Wariner’s “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers”—the title of your book, and a line that lands us in a world of sex and longing. Both songs play with a mythology of desire, wide open and full of ache. How did you come to choose this lyric for the title? What is it about country as a genre that kicks open the screen door and gives Lonely Women what it needs?
Keetje Kuipers: It’s kind of charming to think about the way that straight men get to love on straight women in country music. A kind of dumb luck bravado. Swagger, but making it up as they go. In the Florida Georgia Line song you mention, “Cruise,” there’s a line that really captures this for me: “I put it in park and / Grabbed my guitar // And strummed a couple chords / And sang from the heart.” This is a situation familiar to the country music listener, where the woman in the song is a very particular type of object—long legs coming out of cut-off shorts, a bikini top and flip-flops, bubblegum lipgloss and an almost child-like sense of self-possession—and the male singer is so stunned by her perfection that he almost (almost being the operative word here) doesn’t know how to approach her. But then, somehow, he does—he awkwardly says “hey,” tips his hat, or strums a few clunky chords—and magically she’s his!
That’s a pretty low bar for winning someone’s heart. And it’s the same kind of low bar that’s set in Steve Wariner’s song “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers,” where Wariner implies that if a woman has been alone long enough (and especially if you manage to get a glass of wine in her), she’ll then be a most grateful lover. As much as I love country music and delight in the absurdity of some of its tropes, this was one I felt called to write against. Then, as I worked on the book, I began to see that what is at the heart of this poem—our inability to see the pain of those around us—was really at the heart of almost all of the work I was creating. The title felt like a distillation of this invisible pain I was trying to address across the collection.
But country music has provided ways for me to think about my poetry for decades now, and I’ve long maintained that one of the pleasures that poetry and country music have in common is getting to know its emblems and signifiers, both across the genre and artist by artist. In each of my books, I like to think about what its touchstones are, which emblems I’m using in that particular collection to communicate quickly and succinctly an experience of, say, love or loss. Florida Georgia Line likes to make use of a Chevy with a lift kit, a cashed in lotto ticket, and anything that “ain’t cool ’til you wear the new off” (to quote another of their songs). In the title poem from my book, mine are “bird shit, a feather, unbroken blue sky.” I’m constantly working out what the appearance of a dog or a boat might mean in anyone’s poem, and what they might specifically mean in mine. As a reader gets to know my work, I hope they’ll start to feel a sense of familiarity across my metonymy, the same way a rodeo belt buckle can do a lot of work in a single line of a country song if you already understand why it’s there.
I saw many emblems of your own in The Kármán Line, a book I deeply enjoyed and perhaps admired most for its imagistic rhythms and returns. Will you tell me a bit about some of them—how you came to discover them and which, perhaps, have the most significance for you as you look back on the book now?
DA: Yes! Thank you for such a generous reading of The Kármán Line. I love what you say about emblems and signifiers, how they do quick, potent work to conjure a mood or emotional charge. For me, the book opens with one of those iconic images: sitting in the back of someone’s pickup truck, wondering what the day will bring. It’s a scene I associate with an out-of-time summer feeling, of a drifting, heat-soaked, expectant time, and it sets the tone for the rest of the collection, which returns to this in-between space of waiting, desiring, hovering at the threshold of something more. In the book, that image is echoed in the recurring line, “You make me want to roll my windows down and cruise,” a quote that references Florida Georgia Line but, in the context of the book, also nods to queer cruising culture. I was drawn to the double-play there. The casual tone turns out to mask how deeply the narrator is attached, maybe even a little haunted, by someone just out of their reach. This becomes evident as we move through the broken narrative. The cruising posture becomes a kind of armor or coping mechanism through a driving feeling of longing and ambivalence.
The motif of The Kármán Line, the mathematical boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, offered me a way to think about intimacy at its perceived limits. What happens when we press against what we imagine are the edges of connection? How close or far can we get before we’re “out of orbit,” or no longer tethered? I became interested in the question of whether the boundary between people is ever as clear as we pretend it is. If the Kármán Line is a gradation rather than a hard border, isn’t the idea of a firm boundary between self and other, in a physical, material sense, kind of suspect? (I love Karen Barad’s essay on touch and electrons!) After all, we’re constantly exchanging invisible signals like pheromones, or gestures, and those transmissions change us.
Your poems approach the body with an almost geologic sensibility. I’m thinking about time, erosion and accumulation. I’m always interested in the body’s edges, its limits and dissolutions. How does time, particularly aging, shape the way you write about desire and embodiment?
KK: I’ll answer your question with a quote of your own. You write: “I know about a whole history of relations with my body. But I’ve forgotten my body, substituted its telling for some other stories, partial, compelling, alienated, remote. Easier.”
Getting older has meant, for me, getting further and further away from body, deeper into my head where I feel a distinct distance from the physicality that comes so easily to us when we’re young. So writing Lonely Women Make Good Lovers has, for me, been about journeying back to a body that still exists but has been much neglected in my adulthood. What has been most surprising for me regarding time and the body in this book is the way that writing these poems have somehow turned the clock back for me off the page. I was writing into the inevitability of time, the inescapable loss of youth, the way we can look back but can’t return. And the more I wrote into it, the more I felt like the opposite was true. Reexamining my body and its desires—its ability to desire and to be desired—reawakened them. After writing this book, I feel closer than ever to my body’s core, its liveliness, its depths. I no longer feel like I’m living at its edges or points of dissolution. I don’t know how to keep that feeling going except by continuing to write towards my body rather than the always tantalizingly safe haven of the cerebral. I don’t want to forget my body again, as easy—and comforting—as it can be to do just that.
Can you talk about what you mean when you use the word “easier” to describe substituting non-bodily stories for the stories the body would tell?
DA: The idea that the body stores a history of relations is of course reinforced by studies of intergenerational trauma, and also modern neuroscience that observes how the brain changes under stress, through experiences of extreme hardship, or other forms of trauma. I think the “easier” relation to embodiment, for me, was always the dissociative, which was a psychic state that allowed me at times to subscribe to one experience of embodiment, while lacking the literacy that would allow me to read my body differently. I learned that the body has a language, and produces a narrative, and that story can tell the harder “history of relations” – one that says, this body has been through a lot: all in the name of subscribing to a social ordering that devalued it, over and over again. The narrator in The Kármán Line initially seems to revel in ambiguity or half-connection, but I think what emerges over the course of the book is a deeper yearning for intentionality in touch, for what it might mean to be known in a less alienated fashion.
I hear you talking about going back in time, reawakening the body’s lost sensibilities. Your book’s epigraph by Seamus Heaney is beautiful, and suggests that both self and love can also be thought of as locations in space that are mapped, marked and negotiated. In Lonely Women, intimacy is a shifting terrain, shaped by memory, power, and longing. Do you think of desire as a mode of navigation across distances? And what happens when the map fails or the signal dims? What about when distance collapses?
KK: My experiences with desire and attraction have led me to believe that, for me, it is, in many ways, a map I make for myself. To push that metaphor further, I get to decide if the winding road comes with a warning sign for falling rocks or a pleasant green marker indicating the scenic route. The truth is that a lot of the roads are simply annotated with question marks. I remember thinking that I wanted to kiss my wife before I’d ever kissed her—but I also wondered how I’d feel about kissing her once I had. Not how I might feel about what that said about my sexuality, simply how it might feel in my body to have kissed her. Would I want to kiss her again? More deeply? More intently? Would I want to drown in those kisses?
There is what the body wants and what the head tells it not to want. And there is also what the body doesn’t want and what the head tells it to get comfortable with. Sometimes the body is the truth-teller, and sometimes the head is. It depends on whether or not those wants and un-wants have been dictated or influenced by, say, old copies of Playboy you found under your dad’s bed. Or rape porn. Or previous experiences with a partner who turned out not to be trustworthy. Or something your mom told you about shame. When the map fails or the signal dims, for me it’s because my body and my head are telling different stories.
I think the suddenness of distance collapsing in desire is the suddenness of a narrative coalescing—the head suddenly understands the story the body has been trying to tell. And that collapsing of distance can tell us a lot about our unexamined desires. For me, modes of queer desire have offered some of the greatest opportunities for play and self-forgiveness as I’ve attempted to map out what is hidden or not yet explainable in my own explorations of desire.
Your book is also one of navigation across landscapes. How did place work as a site of discovery or narrative coalescing in your poems?
please talk about how in your work “desire distorts place and how it creates its own gravity”
DA: Thinking about modes of queer desire as opportunities for play and self-forgiveness is lovely. That certainly resonates! To return to learning the body’s stored traumas, which you’re getting at with the disjunct between the head and the body, I wonder if the self-forgiveness required for existing in a queer body is also a kind of practice for aging, which is queer in the sense that it distorts our sense of so much. Our sexuality, gender relations, the capacities and endurances of bodies in relation to one another, the things we can do, the things we want to do, the things we must do for one another. Aging produces the queerest of intimacies. Knowing where the “truth-teller” resides, and the where, why and what for of its workings, is an incredibly helpful tool. And not an easy sensibility to develop.
To bring in place, the New Mexico landscape, for me, has been a charged site through which distortions of self and intimacy, navigated at the level of the “head” and the “body” (to continue with this ever-fuzzy duality) register. In The Kármán Line, desire distorts place. The idea emerged from trying to write honestly about how wanting someone reshapes not only our inner worlds but also our experience of the terrain around us. In the high desert, distance is already strange and has a psychological dimension, so it made sense to me that a poetics of longing would entirely distort encounters with arroyos, highways, motels, and borderlands. A poem can map the warps and pulls of desire, how it collapses time, stretches memory, makes a place feel haunted or holy or both. So extrapolating from there, how does desire outside of just the singular pull towards a person, change our experience of place? What if we start to talk and think about the kinds of desires (of consumption, for property) produced by capitalism? Or the desiring structures maintained by settler colonialism?
That’s where narrative began to coalesce for me: in tracing how external geographies reflect and refract the internal shifts of the speaker, revealing not just where they are, but what kind of world they are shaping through their attachments.
In fact, your book often moves through dreamlike places, conjured by the speaker’s desire. These are mythic, somewhere between fantasy and recollection. How do you think about setting, whether a body, a desert, a resort, and does it become a site of transformation in your work?
KK: When I was coming up as a writer in and of the West, I had for my models poets and prose writers like Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Norman Maclean, and Rick Bass. They wrote about a world that I was living in—one of snow-covered mountains and raging rivers, of illusive trout and even more illusive elk, of wildfires and mushroom gathering and the near-heroic act of bucking up a fallen tree—but that I thought I could only truly access if I transformed myself into a simulacrum of a straight, white man. Their voices traded in the currency of authenticity: the authentic mountain man, river guide, back country woodsman. And because my voice was only an imitation of their voices, my work revealed very little that was authentic about my relationship with the natural world.
In an attempt to shake off these annoying literary ghosts, I decided to teach a literature class called “Outsiders Writing the Outside.” The syllabus was full of poetry and prose by women writers, queer people, and people of color, all of it focused on the theme of the natural environment. Suddenly conservation looked different. Hunting looked different. Even a hike looked different. In teaching those writers to my students, I got to explore a new kind of intimacy with the natural world that I hadn’t known how to access before, one that required I imagine my way out of the colonial self-mythologizing that excludes so many of us from a fully realized participation in the world. In addition to the literary texts I assigned for the course, my students and I also engaged with journalism in print and on the radio. I remember one clip we listened to came from an interview with a person who worked as a conservationist on the U.S.-Mexico border where they talked about how the animals don’t have a border, the stars don’t have a border. The constellations move across the sky, the jack rabbit moves across the desert—there is no border for them. The border is a human imposition on that natural world.
This is a roundabout answer to your question, but here’s where I’m going with it: I began to think about the ways that any setting—even my own body—has its myths and impositions, and how I might imagine my way out of them. This kind of imagining has helped me to work through some of my longest-held ideas about myself, re-interrogating not only the stories I’ve told myself over the years, but also the locations—physical and temporal—where those stories have played out. Transformation isn’t only the method, it’s also the goal.
DA: Transformation as the method and the aim. I feel that and understand the desire to manifest that for oneself and others, as a writer. Especially in a world in which we have so little control, as individuals. I think about the idea of transformation collectively, where as writers, there’s the possibility of enacting some kind of social alchemy that results in the accumulation of counter-narratives and counter-stories. The method and aim becomes bigger than any one book. And it requires many creators over much time, maybe speaking to each other across time. Enacting that breakdown of what you so aptly call “colonial self-mythologizing.”
Hunger moves through your book. Sometimes it’s physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes tied to loss. I think about hunger as an impossible want, something that can’t quite be resolved. What do you think hunger teaches us about intimacy? About selfhood?
KK: I like how you’ve used the phrase “I think about hunger as” in this question. So much of my work is about the thinking about. This might seem counter-intuitive, since my poems are also very embodied, corporeal, fleshy, and full of bodily fluids. In actuality, writing into the body is, for me, a way of interrogating the messy stuffing of the mind. I am trying to make legible my thinking—to others and to myself—to understand what motivates my fears and desires, to use rhetoric in order to commune with hunger. And maybe that’s the kind of hunger I’m most interested in in my poems, and the kind that is least likely to be sated: the hunger for understanding. That’s a hunger that is definitely about trying to locate a greater intimacy with myself and others, and it’s one that can’t be resolved—only reached towards. It’s a hunger that comes with a lot of pleasure as I attempt to fulfill it. I’m not looking to get fed so much as I’m looking to simply enjoy the process of eating. This is another way of saying that I’m not looking for an answer to my questions, I’m looking to understand my thinking around them.
How do you approach the performance of thought in your work? DA: Perhaps this is a great place to end, eschewing satiation for the pleasures of eating. Because the move to sit in the pleasures has me thinking about “performing thought” not to gain knowledge about, power over or demonstrative capacity for ... but perhaps to revere language a bit more, and simultaneously, to explore its social mechanisms. I suppose because language can be so fucked up. Rhetoric is infinitely powerful. W.H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But consider that a contemporary billionaire was able to buy Twitter and re-platform a master rhetorician who became the US president (again). We see how language produces our social institutions, which facilitates the mass transfer of money with lasting material consequences. Make America Great Again. Language is one of our oldest technologies. If we want to survive a bit longer, as a species, we may need to stretch into its awesome potentiality and do something different with it. The encounter with its capacities and intricate mechanisms is pleasurable indeed.
Daisy Atterbury is a scholar, essayist and experimental writer. Atterbury’s debut book, The Kármán Line (Rescue 2024), a 2025 New Mexico Book Award Finalist and a St. Lawrence Book Award Finalist, has been described as “a new cosmology” (Lucy Lippard) and “a cerebral altar to the desert” (Raquel Gutiérrez). The Kármán Line investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the American Southwest. Atterbury teaches in American Studies and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of New Mexico.
Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in BOMB, the New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.