Couplets: A Love Story

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Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . . . Tremendously moving.”

In a moment of introspection, she says, “I saw a person who kissed mostly men, / wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat. / I saw a different person after that.” Millner is brilliant at showing how early moments of lust can be existentially unmooring . . . Couplets is deft, delicate and unexpectedly fun. ”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? Millner is part of a new vanguard of poets who are adopting the stylistic constraints of the past, and queering them to fit their narrative: stories of urbanity, vocation, and desire, set in the landscape of late capitalism. One of her contemporaries, the poet Tommy Pico, writes of queer sex, relationships, and colonialism—adopting the epic poem format, yet neutralizing its usual connotations with colloquialisms like Grindr messages and scenes of sex in the pizza parlor’s bathroom. Similarly, Millner’s work does not shy away from contemporary topics—there are references to fascism rearing its ugly head, internet infighting, and the contradictions of existing in Brooklyn’s queer creative class: all factors that serve to shape her character’s desires, escapist and otherwise. A lot of what she is experiencing has to do with the historical moment we’re in, Millner says—“of trying to parse some kind of imminent or internal erotic investment from all of the things we’ve been told that we’re supposed to want, knowing that the things we find sexy aren’t necessarily separable from the society we live in.”

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.” Like any storyteller, a lover may manipulate narrative as an instrument of control. To write about the ways we love, to produce love as a discursive field, is often a savage campaign. The love poem is never merely for the beloved—it ranges beyond the privacies of person-to-person conveyance, instantiating intimacy in a cultural public. It dreams an audience, establishing its lovers as passion-actors regarded by unknowable spectators. Love, after all, is a needful and petted thing: it demands spectacle, and, like any speech act, accrues power in repetition. When dealing with the ways love is orchestrated for the aesthetic arena, we must ask ourselves a question I once believed rhetorical: what is a love poem for?Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.” As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem. Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.