I know every story doesn’t have to be universal and it’s better to lead with empathy, but so much of the ‘plot’ felt detached from any feeling at all. I know it comes down to personal taste, but lines like, “I’d expected cream, or cream when I’d expected semen,” and “This was why I liked to keep two of her fingers in my body while we slept. 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).

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? 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.but then she uses that to talk about how your experience changes when you externalize it, so even that aspect worked.

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 entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes' worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages. The entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes’ worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages. 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. couplets is a fast-paced, cerebral, and creative little book which plays with the form of both the novel and poetry.A word too easily tossed around, like 'lyric, ' 'stunning, ' 'heartbreaking, ' 'gripping' --but, here, all are true . 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 .

Read it quick because it's mostly composed of couplets (no surprise there, haha), but its length did not detract from the story at all. 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? Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . This explores the experience of realising you’re queer late in your twenties, sabotaging a relationship, and the sapphic relationship that follows messing with your head. From an artistic standpoint, the perfection of Millner's aesthetic choices raise the erotic, emotional, and existential mess of a personal awakening toward the epic. It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing.