Couplets: A Love Story

Product Information

On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event. It’s divided into four books. Yet I really couldn’t tell the difference in tone, style, or themes between

Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems? The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists? While desire is, no doubt, this book's throbbing taxi, Millner's consistent modulation of tone and perspective safeguards the book from the claustrophobia of erotic quest. She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism's demand for incessant labor.' Heather Treseler, Los Angeles Review of Books I want to throw this book across the room in rage at how good it is. Thrilling in its sincerity and intelligence, Couplets gives us everything: artistry, pathos, hilarity, style, and the sense (rare and wondrous) of a beautiful mind at work.”I confess I found myself dreaming up another iteration of Couplets, patched together and fleshed out by its prose sequences, in which the book feels most urgent, reads most confidently, and engages most directly with its intertexts because it is formally freer. I imagined something hewing nearer to Maggie Nelson ’s cult hit Bluets (2009) , a book to which Couplets is certain to be compared. I insist readers look, for example, at “1.6,” a proem fragment recounting the narrator’s first night with the other woman: a breathless, recursive call-and-response between lover and love object: 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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions. Reading it was a thrill, a rearrangement of my psychic molecules.” Then she asked you to share a cab with her; you did; she asked you to walk her in; you did; she asked you to come upstairs; you did; to get into her bed; you did; to press yourself lengthwise against her; you did; […] to remove your pants; you did; to let her taste you; you did; to come again, inside her mouth; you did […] 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. Couplets plunges us into desire so fierce it overwrites existence, exiling us from the lives we know. This is an endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.” Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.”

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. Part of the project of poetry is that of arresting time, of reminding us of the material qualities of language and the material properties of our lives.” Do you think of writing about relationships as a form of catharsis, or is it important to you to keep that aspect out of your work? Millner uses one of art’s oldest forms to make anew one of art’s oldest subjects. Get it while it’s hot."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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions. Reading it was a thrill, a rearrangement of my psychic molecules.' Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn In a fragment near the beginning of A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Roland Barthes outlines a phenomenon he calls annulation, or annulment: an “explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself: by a specifically amorous perversion, it is love the subject loves, not the object.” This process necessitates the disenfranchisement or desubjectification of love-objects (the beloveds) so that lovers may reinstate themselves at the center of power. It’s a self-defense mechanism deployed to prevent, dislodge, or defer the kind of meaningful vulnerability or injury that attends the loss of loved ones. Reading Barthes on love calls to mind another great French interrogator of desire, Annie Ernaux, who, at the end of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat, considers that their coupling had become “a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art.” She documents the liaison’s raptures and griefs to calibrate the unruly feeling between them. Art tames. Abandoned to the annihilations of the affair’s end, Ernaux molds the rubble into a story, becoming god of her own suffering. a pair of end-rhythmed lines of verse that are self-contained in grammatical structure and meaning.

Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . . . Tremendously moving . . . In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the ‘little folds’ that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life.” 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? 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.” 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 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. A dazzling, virtuosic debut––and one of the best books I have read in a long time . . . This book has changed me." Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” is already attracting a swell of critical and popular attention. Our reviewer, Kristen Millares Young, writes, "Restless, imaginative and daring, ‘Couplets’ advances the canon of the erotic." In Couplets , the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?

I absolutely loved reading this collection of poems. It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special. It is about the love after coming out as queer. 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. And isn’t love itself a type of rhyme? And don’t gender and genre share one route? Maybe I really am a poet, needing as I do from these imperfect sets,

Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality? It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end.