Couplets
2023
Ratings3
Average rating4
15
Ratings3
Average rating4
Maggie Millner's seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. What ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation. Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships - the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments. Playful, clever, lovestruck, griefstruck, its narrator dances a tightrope of her own invention with captivating passion and skill.
Reviews with the most likes.
Angsty poetic prose on modern love, life, and sex? Yes, thank you, more please.
I read this as part of the Tournament of Books Summer reading program (Camp ToB). It's clever in some ways (“Couplets” as a title for a book about coupling, come on!), has a lot of sex, and the narrator seems to be trying to develop a sense of self. It wasn't really my cup of tea, though. I was glad I could read it in two moderate sittings.
