Couplets by Maggie Millner is a novel written in “rhyming couplets and prose vignettes.” I am unfamiliar with both and therefore didn't know what to expect, but I was initially hooked by the cover and the description of “a dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone." In her searing literary debut, the poet renders a portrait of contemporary desire that resists categorization

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.

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 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? 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 […]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.