Eco-Intimacy: Poems on Queering Kinship, Desire, & the More-Than-Human World (Wisconsin Book Festival) | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

Eco-Intimacy: Poems on Queering Kinship, Desire, & the More-Than-Human World (Wisconsin Book Festival)

Arts + Literature Laboratory welcomes the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival for four poetry events on Saturday, October 25, 2025. You can find a complete schedule of events at the Wisconsin Book Festival website.

Poets Elizabeth Bradfield, Donika Kelly, and Keetje Kuipers will present the fourth and final program of the day at 7:30pm.

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.

Poet Elizabeth Bradfield

Elizabeth Bradfield

Writer/Naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s (she/her) books are SOFAR, which includes poems that were published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, and Orion; Toward Antarctica; Once Removed; Approaching Ice, which was a finalist from the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets; Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, co-created with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield and winner of the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, co-created with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman. Her poems have appeared in The Slowdown, The New Yorker, Poetry and her honors include a Stegner Fellowship and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. Liz works as a naturalist and field... Read More

Poet Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and Pushcart Prize winner, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her... Read More

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 children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

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