Couplets

“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, Couplets dwells among the ‘little folds’ that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life.”—Kamran Javadizadeh, The New Yorker

“Political and poetic considerations of storytelling—the pitfalls of narrativizing one’s own life and the lives of others—infuse this absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love . . . Reading Millner’s poetry is as satisfying as submitting to a lover’s touch.”—Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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.”—Electric Literature

“Lovers of horny, rhyming poetry rejoice: Millner’s ‘love story in poems’ arrives a week before Valentine’s Day, just in time to tie your brain to its bedposts. Kink and queerness, power and polyamory—this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all.”—The Millions

“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

“A dazzling, feather-light tour de force—witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. I want a time machine so I can give this book to my Eugene Onegin-obsessed teenage self!”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

“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 plunges us into desire so fierce it overwrites existence, exiling us from the lives we know. This is an endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.”—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“In her luminous, electric debut, Millner creates an original form to express the headlong revelations, obsessions, and erotic geometry of love. Couplets is propulsive, poignant, and terrific at showing the way carnality is tethered to vulnerability.”—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

“I want to throw this book across the room in rage at how good it is. Thrilling in its sincerity and intelligence, Couplets gives us everything: artistry, pathos, hilarity, style, and the sense (rare and wondrous) of a beautiful mind at work.”—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different (National Book Award Finalist)

“Maggie Millner takes the stateliest of forms and feeds it to the flames of a consuming passion. Engined by rhyme, propelled by lust and hunger, Maggie Millner’s Couplets—effortlessly learned and endlessly sexy—is already an exquisite exemplar of my queer poetic canon.”—Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers

"A dazzling, virtuosic debut—and one of the best books I have read in a long time . . . This book has changed me."—Aria Aber, author of Hard Damage

“A stunning debut, an instant classic . . . 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?”—Maureen N. McLane, author of More Anon

“Millner’s story-in-verse is a metafictive marvel . . . Rich and unexpected . . . a gorgeous lesson in form.”—Barbara Egel, Booklist

“Copulative pleasures abound in this spectacular debut . . . As the perfectly paced narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepens . . . Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)