Maggie Millner’s debut collection, “Couplets,” has a red hot cover, but the poems inside are even hotter. 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.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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? 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. Poetry expreses the anxiety and delirium of love really well and it fit well with the narrators worries about cheating and heartbreak.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. And parallel to the metamorphosing forms of literary narratives the narrator is also undergoing transformations in her self-discovery and sexuality as a woman.

She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet.My main complaint is that I wish this book were longer: there are many places where the characters or scenes could be expanded, and I think this book's brevity works against it. 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. Milner looks at the cataclysmic feeling at the end of a relationship, and explores the awakening of lust and intimacy in lush, sensual detail. 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.

In a moment of introspection, she says, “I saw a person who kissed mostly men, / wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat. It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special. 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. I think there is something there, and I know that Millner’s work is beloved and most reviews are glowing, but whatever it is it simply did not resonate with me. The writing is deftly poetic, the explorations of literary narratives are seamlessly woven into the novel’s story, and the story itself is subtly layered with thoughts on the freedom to make choices in our lives (and more) and engagingly paced.Kink and queerness, power and polyamory-- this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all . 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.

It’s a very short book but there were lots of lines that took me out of the reading experience completely. 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’s captivating, seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession, gender, identity, and the art and act of literary transformation. Lovers of horny, rhyming poetry rejoice: Millner’s ‘love story in poems’ arrives a week before Valentine’s Day, just in time to tie your brain to its bedposts.reflecting on her previous boyfriend and the woman she’s now seeing, the book follows along on a series of vignettes exploring queerness, power, loss, freedom, desire, identity, art, love, and at its core - relationships. It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing. I appreciate that's an important part of the narrator's experience and personality, so I can't say it should have been removed, it just didn't work for me as well.