Couplets: A Love Story

Product Information

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.

themes about monogamy, hall passes, queerness, sadness, grief, loneliness, sexuality, desires, fear, guilt, and love. another reviewer described the reading experience as a fever dream and that description of the reading experience for this felt apt and resonated.Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes.

Kink and queerness, power and polyamory— this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all. 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? Emma Specter, Vogue'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.

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. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. 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?

Millner’s story-in-verse—trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point—centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself. 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 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.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. 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. The reason for the slightly lower rating is I personally didn’t love the couplets for this, I think free verse would’ve suited it better - couplets felt too restrictive for the mess that is this experience. It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special.