While the poems in Keetje Kuipers' first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, closely examine loss--particularly how women experience the loss of lovers, homes, children, even their own bodies--her new work, The Keys to the Jail, looks to identify who is at fault for those losses: who can we blame? The speakers in these new poems blame themselves for everything: the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once beautiful body, even their own voracious desires. Their self-condemnation becomes apparent as Keetje teases out two speakers—two selves—in the poems. While she has always been interested in the use of persona, the new poems in The Keys to the Jail attempt to capitalize on our ideas of female roles and the obligations that come with them, finding failure in the self who cannot succeed as a mother or a wife, a sex symbol or a daughter.