Couplets: A Love Story

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As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.

The poems — constructed from endlessly clever rhyming couplets — describe a young woman’s uneasy shift from loving a man to loving a woman for the first time. 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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions.” The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists? Couplets by Maggie Millner is a novel written in “rhyming couplets and prose vignettes.” 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." The title of the book, Couplets , is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.Millner's verse is neat, simple - with all the heartache, the longing, the confusion of falling in love with another woman, and then to explore all levels of love - the obsessive, to fear, to envy, and how to become yourself at the end. themes about monogamy, hall passes, queerness, sadness, grief, loneliness, sexuality, desires, fear, guilt, and 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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions. Reading it was a thrill, a rearrangement of my psychic molecules.’ Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Do you think of writing about relationships as a form of catharsis, or is it important to you to keep that aspect out of your work? The rote labor of putting one thing into another—a dowel into a hole, a word into a line—can furnish a space of imperfect beauty (squeaky slats, slant rhymes) and improvised joy . . . Whoever masters these, Millner suggests, is worth a hundred screws and then a hundred more.” A dazzling, virtuosic debut––and one of the best books I have read in a long time . . . This book has changed me." Such a continuity need not be mapped as tragedy. Couplets is most compelling when the narrator writes her history of love not as a linear sequence but as an atemporal, echoic triangulation of desire—one in which her past and future lovers overlap, interpenetrate, and commune. In fights with the woman (now the narrator’s girlfriend), she finds herself parroting “the same old // dialectic I’d tried to leave behind” with the ex, but there are other, more generative remainders that have followed her across time, too, into this new coupling. In soothing her girlfriend through depressive episodes, she confesses, “I was drawing from the well / of love he filled.” The narrator becomes “a kind of conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted // with my mouth.” In these moments, the transpositional capacities of intimacy take on a wiser, more tender quality, and what has chiefly been a mechanically narrative queering of the narrator’s experience appears emotionally stranger and more textually surprising. The passage is also a powerful instance of reversal: here, it is the lovers who transform the narrator into their shared story, not she who subordinates them to hers. The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.