On All Its Charms by Keetje Kuipers

Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019. 112 pages. $17.00.

A one-winged meadowlark mercifully crushed into a road, bats’ shadows gracing a lake beneath a sky laced with powerlines—“a moon so big, so full / of itself that though I know it belongs / to the world, it can’t be anything but // American”—we can’t help but see our country in the poems of All Its Charms; in their unassuming daily-ness, in their quirk and surprising raptures, the landscapes shaped as much by nature as infrastructure. In Keetje Kuipers’s candid, funny, achingly wistful third collection from BOA, Kuipers’s poems unearth a kind of magic hidden in the spaces we dwell in, from our homes to our towns, to our nation itself.

Kuipers’s narratives immerse us in the off-kilter, often surprising idiosyncrasies and contradictions of America, particularly in the places we go to see ourselves and our own country reflected. In “Shooting Clay Pigeons After the Wedding,” we’re directed not to an obvious violence, but the speaker’s tender hope of loving her new wife well in a country where their marriage can still be met with hostility:

I held my breath and the gun like a man,
shattering the altar of cloud-laced sky.

I was doing it by instinct—that new
muscle near my heart. I wanted more than

anything to be a natural. I
wanted more than anything to be true.

The landscape where she fires a shotgun for sport is woven with the imagery of a church wedding she could have just arrived from, as if both ceremonies share their little dangers as well as their values of commitment and grace.

In a Russian vodka room she used to haunt, we’re treated to rich hors d’oeuvres capped by “four icy / vials of terrible vodka”; the kind of spread our speaker’s younger self once saw as elegant, but now in the light of adulthood seems gauche. “There’s something / so retched,” she observes, “about trying to revisit the past” (“Still Life with Caviar and Crayons”). In “Collaborators,” the modern commuter ferries, “we drive our big cars onto because now // we can go anywhere,” can’t escape their darker historical role in US immigration. Kuipers reveals the banal fixtures of middle-class life as

. . . ferries that took
the people from the clear shore of their lives

to the internment camps on the mainland
because nothing could be more dangerous

than living among each other where voices
unnetted and rising in complaint

are a flock of birds that can make no better
song than that one which we sing together.

These observations on the progression of time and self remind us that we live among ghosts in a country where every city was paved over someone else’s home, that our comforts were once paid for by another’s suffering. Revisiting the past becomes so wretched it can be easier not to think about how we comply with those changes. But as time moves on, the costs of our progress are forgotten, even as we can see the land changing in front of us. “Now, when we walk / the beach, anything we find / too perfect is made / of plastic,” Kuipers observes in “Essentials.” She closes by lamenting, “I have seen / the oceans. I don’t need / to lose anything else.”

For Kuipers, this progression is as historical as it is personal, forming both her country and her home and often conflating the two things. In “Abatement,” she has “the lawn where [her] daughter lolls / blanket-sprayed for mosquitoes” by an exterminator. Yet her concern for her daughter’s safety is tinged with anxiety for the future that safety may leave her with. Kuipers wonders,

. . . And when

he and I bring this world to its sure end, what
will be the best we can hope for then? An afternoon

not unlike this one: palmetto bugs testing the air
with their antennae, waiting to see who’ll come next.

But more than place, time is at the heart of All Its Charms. Readers arrive in the middle of Kuipers’s family life, with only briefly remembered glimpses into the life that came before it, suggesting that memory—just as much as the past itself—creates the people we become. In many of the moments Kuipers narrates, the past can’t stop itself from rushing in to meet her—as in “Told You So,” in which she cleans up after her daughter “with the old plaid boxers of the man I thought I’d marry,” showing how the shadows of our former loves, no matter how we grow out of them, never fully leave us. She closes the poem by recalling, “Before I went to the clinic to get pregnant, I cried onto the shoulder / of an old flame, worried that whoever I loved next would never / know my body when it was beautiful,” prompting us to consider—as with the history of any place—the histories our bodies bear the responsibility of carrying.

Through motherhood we can see how even our personal histories are cyclical. In “In the Yard I Lie on My Back and Dream of Turtles,” Kuipers narrates how her daughter once brought her leaves, sticks, and pebbles as she napped in the grass and considers how mothers must eventually become part of their children’s pasts.

She piles them on the belly
that was her first home, this belly

that sleeps now like a sea calmed.
She is making something new

of me, something to someday burn
only in the quiet ditch of her memory,

a body subsumed by earth, carrying
the new world on a shell made of bone.

Our mothers bring the past into us, and every day we carry it further from them, even as we learn to replace them. As a mother, Kuipers has to think about her role not only as a nurturer of her daughter, but as a participant in this cycle: “if she doesn’t / learn nostalgia now,” she wonders in “Anemoia,” “how will I ever teach her / regret? I have to get her ready for the future.” But in the end, Kuipers is as skeptical of nostalgia as she is enthralled by it, wary of how it recasts the past. The inevitability of time’s passage is mirrored by the mother’s body, which swells with life, “doing the dirty // work it’s always wanted to, spiraling deep within itself to make / from this wildness something that doesn’t care if it belongs” (“Native Species”).

Though the politics of these poems are rarely, if ever, explicit, Kuipers’s examination of the tenuousness of the past and the uncertainty of the future is timely in the MAGA era, which calls for an erasure of our nation’s historical offenses in exchange for the privileges the historically privileged fear they may lose. The poems of All Its Charms press us into considering how our interior lives (both the self and the home) are shaped by the country they exist within, how our bodies may be countries all their own, and like this country, hold transgressions and mercies and wonders of many kinds. As dazzling as they are flawed, as ordinary as they are alluring. “Oh, America,” Kuipers proclaims in “Getting the Baby to Sleep,” “on those nights / when you are too beautiful for me / to continue to forgive you any longer— // . . . I go out into your radiant arms.”