DESCRIPTION

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 THE AUTHOR

Maggie Millner was born and raised in rural upstate New York. She teaches writing at Yale and is a senior editor at The Yale Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Couplets is her first book.

REVIEWS

"An astounding debut. Ugh: astound? A word too easily tossed around, like 'lyric, ' 'stunning, ' 'heartbreaking, ' 'gripping'--but, here, all are true . . . This is a book that seduces the brain . . . Millner's couplets enact high-wire acts of wit and poignancy."
--Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book Review

"Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . . .Tremendously moving. . . In its most thrilling moments,Coupletsdwells among the 'little folds' that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life."
--Kamran Javadizadeh,The New Yorker

"Restless, imaginative and daring,Coupletsadvances the canon of the erotic."
--Kristen Millares Young,The Washington Post

"If you're on the hunt for a good book to reset your own brain, might I suggest Maggie Millner'sCouplets: A Love Story?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."
--Gregory Cowles,The New York Times Book Review(Editors' Choice)

"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. 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."
--J. Howard Rosier,Vulture(Best New Books)