Name: Poets & Pole Dancers
Start: 2025-04-04T17:00:00-06:00
Location: Sacred Ally

Hosted by Sacred Ally, Keetje Kuipers will be reading from her newest poetry book, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. Gabrielle Bates and Henrietta Goodman will be reading their poetry as well and in-between each author will be local talented pole dancers from the Pole Fiction community.
About the Book: The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. Engaging a poetics of humility, these unforgettable love poems lean 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.” In this queer and complicated new book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire, finding compromise in a body reborn through love.
About Keetje Kuipers: Writer and editor Keetje Kuipers (pronounced Kay-tcha Ky-pers) is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA Editions. Her most recent collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), was the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was selected by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2010 by Poets & Writers, her first book also appeared in the top ten on the contemporary poetry bestseller list. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club selection for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje lives with her wife and two children in Missoula, Montana, as an uninvited guest on land that is the longtime home of the Salish and Kalispel peoples.
About Gabrielle Bates: Gabrielle Bates's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review. Her debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Alabama, Bates is currently based in the Pacific Northwest, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. You can follow her on ig (@gabrielle_bates_) and twitter (@GabrielleBates)
About Henrietta Goodman: Henrietta Goodman is the author of four books of poetry: Antillia (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), All That Held Us (BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Colorado State University, 2013), and Take What You Want (Alice James Books, 2007). She is co-author (with the poet Ryan Scariano) of a chapbook titled Flicker Noise (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her poems and essays have been published in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, Bennington Review, River Teeth, Cleaver, and more. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Montana Arts Council, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Fishtrap, and other organizations. She teaches in the English department of Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT.