Couplets
A Love Story
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“An astounding debut.”
—Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book Review
A dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone
A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real.
One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. 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.
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. 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.
"An endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Copulative pleasures abound in this spectacular debut that cloaks memoir in rhyming couplets and prose poems. The autofictional plot reads like a fairy tale: a woman in Brooklyn leaves her old life with "its familiar openwork/ of sex and teaching, kale and NPR// and the boyfriend at the center I revered," for a woman, "My eye loved// everything it fell upon./ And then one day it fell upon/ a mirror. And he was nowhere/ in the mirror. And she was everywhere." Love and lust find uncanny expression under poetic constraints ("isn't love itself a type// of rhyme?"). The rhymes are at once delicious—at times gasp-worthy—and yet so expertly deployed that they become "a shape that feels more native than imposed." "Those days, I was something else:// a soft vacuity. A sort of net./ No guilt, no age. No epithet." As the perfectly paced narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepens; love becomes "the engine of self-knowledge." Exploring the question of how exactly to tell her story, the poet admits: "Sometimes when you sat down, alone with your mind, you felt you were performing both parts of an elaborate duet." Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.
