Maggie Millner’s first book, “Couplets,” breathes new life into an old form to tell the story of a romance that catches its heroine off guard. I’m not sure whether it was the structure; I heavily preferred the vignettes to the poetry, and I liked the use of second person in the vignettes, but I found the story somewhat overdone and overwritten. It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing.

couplets (brilliant to use the form couplets for this subject) ponders the ways in which desire drives our decisions, how relationships mold us or change us or maybe do nothing at all but remain a singularity, and interweaves literary analysis on love. 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. 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. Told in a mixture of rhyming couplets and prose poems, the novel flows beautiful and is compulsively readable. 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.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. Kink and queerness, power and polyamory— this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all.

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. She's interested in the labels we use to define ourselves -- queer, polyamorous, kinky, vanilla -- and what these mean on an emotional level. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” is already attracting a swell of critical and popular attention. One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life.

I liked this author’s previous books but without giving anything away this book seemed like it was written really fast. 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 ? 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.

My eyes would glaze over and I was taking in words without comprehension because it seemed as though they were picked at random. It is a gorgeous book and an amazing demonstration of how a memoir can be turned on its conventional head and presented in a structure and form that defies the genre. She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor. It’s a story of romantic attachment and romantic betrayal told almost entirely in rhymed couplets, and it’s a balancing act of such sly virtuosity that it may give you vertigo. Couplets is also about memory, of forgetfulness, of loves requited and unrequited, of shared experiences, of how we bond over and over again, while it is a book about two, it is a book about many, about all of us.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 . 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? it begs the question whether we are shaped by every relationship we have, whether we are vessels which hold the ghosts of all our previous lovers inside of us. the whole style of rhyming couplets just didn't work for me and, honestly, if that's what you're going to do, at least commit to making them rhyme!