Eco-Intimacy: Poems on Queering Kinship, Desire, & the More-than-Human World
How do we discover, forge, and hold connection in new ways? When intimacy changes between lovers and friends over time, how are those changes illuminated or complicated by the animals, plants, and landscapes around us? Join poets Elizabeth Bradfield, Donika Kelly, and Keetje Kuipers as they read from and discuss their new poetry collections that explore scenes of nontraditional desire, friendship, and an engagement with the unbuilt world.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s newest collection of poems, SOFAR, applies a naturalist’s eye to the life of the ocean and the heart.
Donika Kelly’s new The Natural Order of Things presents poems that sing the hymn of companionship, illuminating intimacy as an act of repair between both humans and the earth.
And Keetje Kuipers’ recent collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, encourages us to remember the power of the sensual even as we lean into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance between our body and the known world.
These three writers will trace that delicate weft that binds us all as they share poems and conversation around the queer joys—and griefs—of living and loving in this ecological moment.
Elizabeth Bradfield
Elizabeth Bradfield’s newest collection is SOFAR: Poems. Her other books include Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; Approaching Ice, a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize; and the co-created Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Editor-in-chief of Broadsided and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Liz teaches creative writing, works as a naturalist and field assistant, and lives on Cape Cod. www.ebradfield.com
Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Keetje Kuipers
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 American Poetry Review, 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 chi dren in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.