Couplets: A Love Story

Product Information

It’s a very short book but there were lots of lines that took me out of the reading experience completely. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.

The internet, whose central purpose seemed to be to turn the best parts of humanity—our hungers for belongings, art, and sex— into surveillance logs and payouts for execs. 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. 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. I liked this author’s previous books but without giving anything away this book seemed like it was written really fast.

Maggie Millner’s seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. My eyes would glaze over and I was taking in words without comprehension because it seemed as though they were picked at random. 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.

I don’t mean to break my personal rule of not praising books for their length but it’s a very quick read.

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. The nature writing was very beautiful and the balance between poetic abstraction and storytelling worked really well.

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 this riveting debut, Maggie Millner makes the rhyming couplet-that supposedly staid, outmoded vehicle of 18th century moralism-an engine of radical metamorphosis and scorching sex. Couplets is about a woman who leaves her current relationship to embark on a romance with another woman who she is completely infatuated with.With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. 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! it can feel overly self-aware at times, as you feel her trying to get ahead of the narrative while she introduces you to it. She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism's demand for incessant labor.

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. unlike anything I've ever read before, this delves into queer first loves, desire, toxicity, and picking yourself back up again. A word too easily tossed around, like 'lyric, ' 'stunning, ' 'heartbreaking, ' 'gripping' --but, here, all are true . 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. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society, www.

I loved this narrator who was both naive and cynical, innocent and knowing, hopeful and world weary. the speaker is living a somewhat regular life with her long time boyfriend, when she meets a woman at a bar and decides to enter into her first queer relationship.