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. 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? The brevity of the poems, the subtle nature of the words on paper that refuse to be bracketed and while there is no subjectivity at all, there is a memoir in all of this somewhere.

themes about monogamy, hall passes, queerness, sadness, grief, loneliness, sexuality, desires, fear, guilt, and love.

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. I loved this narrator who was both naive and cynical, innocent and knowing, hopeful and world weary. It was hard to know which aspects to feel guilty for, so I was like my catholic mother, always rounding up. Even though it’s a linear story with a very internal focus, I still felt like nothing had changed at the end, even if that’s factually untrue. 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.

Read it quick because it's mostly composed of couplets (no surprise there, haha), but its length did not detract from the story at all. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. A word too easily tossed around, like 'lyric, ' 'stunning, ' 'heartbreaking, ' 'gripping' --but, here, all are true . Starts with a lot of references to a particular kind of life in Brooklyn but then relaxes and becomes quite heartfelt and sincere (without taking itself too seriously).You can sense Millner fracturing rhymes and meters to create lines as iconoclastic as the sexual framework her speaker is struggling to discover. 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? The book as a whole is an experimental-feeling yet unyielding love letter to precisely those kinds of questions. 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.

I'm always here for queer literature, so that's initially what drew me to this as I was unfamiliar with Maggie Millner's previous work.

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 ? A word too easily tossed around, like ‘lyric,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘gripping’—but, here, all are true . 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. 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. 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.

Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.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. Overall, I really hate writing negative reviews and I’m glad to see that most people seem to be enjoying this one! I particularly enjoyed the presentation of queer obsession, particularly that “first” queer relationship and what it means, and realising who you are in between it all.