Couplets: A Love Story

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The poems — constructed from endlessly clever rhyming couplets — describe a young woman’s uneasy shift from loving a man to loving a woman for the first time. The continuous, stream-of-consciousness vibe really worked to represent the panic and questioning that comes with this kind of experience.

My eyes would glaze over and I was taking in words without comprehension because it seemed as though they were picked at random. A word too easily tossed around, like ‘lyric,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘gripping’—but, here, all are true .

Starts with a lot of references to a particular kind of life in Brooklyn but then relaxes and becomes quite heartfelt and sincere (without taking itself too seriously).

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. For a woman who has only known how to love men, suddenly falls in love with women, and that's when the storytelling tone changes - the personal also becomes political, and the question of falling in and out of love is not just experiential. Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships - the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments.

I think she encapsulates stuff like desire and power in relationships so precisely, but perhaps it’s the closes precision that made it hard to feel anything actually. 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). I'm always here for queer literature, so that's initially what drew me to this as I was unfamiliar with Maggie Millner's previous work. The internet, whose central purpose seemed to be to turn the best parts of humanity—our hungers for belongings, art, and sex— into surveillance logs and payouts for execs. I know that I'm in the minority here, but the writing felt like someone thinking they were doing a lot more than they actually are—It didn’t come across as sincere, and everything felt wrapped-up and faux-serious, and hidden like it was all an inside joke.

Breathing, typing these lines, texting a friend, checking the time, thinking it wouldn’t always feel like this, but still, sometimes, it was.

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. 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? It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing. If you're on the hunt for a good book to reset your own brain, might I suggest Maggie Millner's Couplets: A Love Story ? Political and poetic considerations of storytelling--the pitfalls of narrativizing one's own life and the lives of others--infuse this absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love .

Couplets is also about memory, of forgetfulness, of loves requited and unrequited, of shared experiences, of how we bond over and over again, while it is a book about two, it is a book about many, about all of us. I started reading this book mostly curious about the choice of a verse novel for the debut only to find it impressively rich in the author’s quest for literary narratives, each with immense possibilities as well as limitations (poetry, rhyming couplets, free-form prose, autofiction, first- and second-person narrative) for expressing one’s journey through love and life. 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.It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special. She also has of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. 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. 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. 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.