Couplets: A Love Story

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It’s a story of romantic attachment and romantic betrayal told almost entirely in rhymed couplets, and it’s a balancing act of such sly virtuosity that it may give you vertigo. All I know is that it never gets irritating - the ‘you’ is well-delineated enough that I didn’t feel the ‘you’ was a way of forcing me to relate. Millner's verse is neat, simple - with all the heartache, the longing, the confusion of falling in love with another woman, and then to explore all levels of love - the obsessive, to fear, to envy, and how to become yourself at the end. In this riveting debut, Maggie Millner makes the rhyming couplet-that supposedly staid, outmoded vehicle of 18th century moralism-an engine of radical metamorphosis and scorching sex. Sexy, sophisticated, surprising, propulsive, worldly, tender, formally masterful: who knew the nineteenth-century novel would find an astonishing critical efflorescence in poetry, in Brooklyn, in the twenty-first century?

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? 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. 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. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

This really worked for me with the content, but forced me to rush through, when I really wanted to take my time and savour what was being said.

The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. A word too easily tossed around, like ‘lyric,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘gripping’—but, here, all are true . It wasn’t a story that felt lost, exactly, but more that everything together held no importance to me. The nature writing was very beautiful and the balance between poetic abstraction and storytelling worked really well. Playful, clever, lovestruck, griefstruck, its narrator dances a tightrope of her own invention with captivating passion and skill.I particularly enjoyed the presentation of queer obsession, particularly that “first” queer relationship and what it means, and realising who you are in between it all. 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? 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. I mean I enjoyed it — the conversations — thoughts about lust, power, beliefs, modern life — dating, sexing, suffering,… from the context that perhaps poetry represented one woman’s life-force. 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?

unlike anything I've ever read before, this delves into queer first loves, desire, toxicity, and picking yourself back up again. Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. I don’t mean to break my personal rule of not praising books for their length but it’s a very quick read. A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” is already attracting a swell of critical and popular attention.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.