Couplets, Maggie Millner
Couplets, Maggie Millner
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Couplets
A Love Story

Author: Maggie Millner

Narrator: Maggie Millner

Unabridged: 1 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/07/2023

Categories: Fiction, Poetry, Lgbtq+

Synopsis

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.

About Maggie Millner

Maggie Millner is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Bomb, and The Nation, among other publications. She is a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at The Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ron

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, ‘Cou......more

Goodreads review by Ulysse

In case you were wondering: Couplets Is a novel in rhyming couplets About couplets Who break up and form new couplets If you think my couplets have lazy rhymes Try Maggie Millner whose own rhymes Are the laziest I have ever seen She can rhyme seen with nothing Even closely resembling it I’m not saying her rh......more

Goodreads review by leah

told in rhyming couplets, this short novel follows a young woman as she embarks on her first queer relationship. 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......more

Goodreads review by Natasha

The only thing worse than heartbreak is a bisexual Yale woman gentrifying BedStuy......more

Quotes

“A book that seduces the brain…Millner’s couplets enact high-wire acts of wit and poignancy.” New York Times Book Review

“Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire.” New Yorker

“[An] absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love…Reading Millner’s poetry is as satisfying as submitting to a lover’s touch.” Los Angeles Review of Books

“Couplets is chock-full of lines and phrases that can stop a reader in their tracks…I’ve never read a better encapsulation of what it means to question a previously fixed idea of identity and selfhood.”  Vogue

“Kink and queerness, power and polyamory―this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all.” Millions.com

“Love and lust find uncanny expression under poetic constraints…As the perfectly paced narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepen…Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A gorgeous lesson in form.” Booklist

“Witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.” Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

“An endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.” Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
  • Electric Literature
  • Millions.com Pick
  • New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
  • Vulture.com Pick
  • Debutiful Pick
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