Couplets: A Love Story

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The writing is deftly poetic, the explorations of literary narratives are seamlessly woven into the novel’s story, and the story itself is subtly layered with thoughts on the freedom to make choices in our lives (and more) and engagingly paced. She falls into a consuming affair—into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind. In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the 'little folds' that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life. I especially admired the sections on sex and intimacy: Milner captures the physicality of the body, and the overwhelming sensations of lust and need in a compelling and rich way.

Couplets compelled me like a love affair—I didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go to bed, didn’t want to get off the subway, I just wanted to hear the story it was telling, which was, ultimately, a story about form–what are the forms (of intimacy, vocation, domesticity, verse, pleasure) we want to be held by, and to break free from? Millner’s ultimate achievement is to draw open the distance between the book’s first line and its ostensibly identical second, between the self that one takes as given and the self, no less true, that one cannot help but make. The entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes’ worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages. The entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes' worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages.In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships--the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments--and how the people we love can show us who we truly are. Maggie Millner’s first book, “Couplets,” breathes new life into an old form to tell the story of a romance that catches its heroine off guard. From an artistic standpoint, the perfection of Millner’s aesthetic choices raise the erotic, emotional, and existential mess of a personal awakening toward the epic.

She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor. my favorite part came early on, “Mostly I can’t see myself at all / until I sense in someone else a parallel, / like how I only realize what / I want at the moment I attain it, / my mind the final part of me to know.From an artistic standpoint, the perfection of Millner's aesthetic choices raise the erotic, emotional, and existential mess of a personal awakening toward the epic. Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. It was hard to know which aspects to feel guilty for, so I was like my catholic mother, always rounding up.

It is a gorgeous book and an amazing demonstration of how a memoir can be turned on its conventional head and presented in a structure and form that defies the genre. I can recognize that this was at the very least well written but I found it a little convoluted at times. Maggie Millner's captivating, seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession, gender, identity, and the art and act of literary transformation.I wanted to keep reading to see what was going to happen, to get to the inevitable crash that was set up from the very first page. And I knew my sneering hauteur was its own repellent, habit: an itchy frock I wore to parties, where I made small talk about book reviews and carbon capture while down below the surface of our banter, I’d feel a sheet of rime steadily start to form between me and my counterpart”.

Millner's story-in-verse--trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point--centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself. The reason for the slightly lower rating is I personally didn’t love the couplets for this, I think free verse would’ve suited it better - couplets felt too restrictive for the mess that is this experience. There's an intensity that is intrinsic in LGBTQIA+ lit, particularly involving two cis women, likely because emotions run very high in these relationships (yes, higher than in straight relationships, in my experience).She falls into a consuming affair--into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind. The entire story is told in rhyming couplets and so it was a real treat to listen to this on audiobook and read by the author. Milner looks at the cataclysmic feeling at the end of a relationship, and explores the awakening of lust and intimacy in lush, sensual detail.