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Couplets: A Love Story

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. The continuous, stream-of-consciousness vibe really worked to represent the panic and questioning that comes with this kind of experience.I appreciate that's an important part of the narrator's experience and personality, so I can't say it should have been removed, it just didn't work for me as well. I can recognize that this was at the very least well written but I found it a little convoluted at times.

I started reading this book mostly curious about the choice of a verse novel for the debut only to find it impressively rich in the author’s quest for literary narratives, each with immense possibilities as well as limitations (poetry, rhyming couplets, free-form prose, autofiction, first- and second-person narrative) for expressing one’s journey through love and life.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 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? Giving it 3 stars as I don’t think this is a book which will stick with me but whilst I listened to it I did really enjoy it and found the poetry really pleasant to experience. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force—witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.

The brevity suits the transitory feelings and intense phases it’s dealing with - the romance with a woman (her first queer relationship) that catalyses a breakup with a long-term partner, the realisation that you take yourself with you into every new situation. 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.I don’t mean to break my personal rule of not praising books for their length but it’s a very quick read. I think she encapsulates stuff like desire and power in relationships so precisely, but perhaps it’s the closes precision that made it hard to feel anything actually.

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.

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. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing.

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