<DIV><p><I>The Keys to the Jail</I> asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires. Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.<BR><BR><p><B>Dolores Park</B><br><BR><p>In the flattening California dusk,<BR>women gather under palms with their bags<BR><BR><p>of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered<BR>with the trash of the day, paper napkins<BR><BR><p>blowing across the legs of those who still<BR>drown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirtless<BR><BR><p>in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps,<BR>they lie suspended. This is my one good<BR><BR><p>life?watching the exchange of embraces,<BR>counting the faces assembled outside<BR><BR><p>the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by<BR>the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock<BR><BR><p>of the gay couple’s hands, desperate clapping<BR>of dark pigeons?who will take it from me?<BR><BR><p>A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, <B>Keetje Kuipers</B>'s debut collection, <I>Beautiful in the Mouth</I>, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and is currently an assistant professor at Auburn University.<BR></DIV>