Couplets: A Love Story

Product Information

I felt for the character -- in many ways I think about sexuality similarly, so perhaps that's why (and sexuality is the main thread/theme/etc of the work). 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. From an artistic standpoint, the perfection of Millner’s aesthetic choices raise the erotic, emotional, and existential mess of a personal awakening toward the epic. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Poetry expreses the anxiety and delirium of love really well and it fit well with the narrators worries about cheating and heartbreak.

themes about monogamy, hall passes, queerness, sadness, grief, loneliness, sexuality, desires, fear, guilt, and love. In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the ‘little folds’ that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life. Maybe that's why I felt most free when I was choked and tied with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged; when told that I was very, very bad. The writing is deftly poetic, the explorations of literary narratives are seamlessly woven into the novel’s story, and the story itself is subtly layered with thoughts on the freedom to make choices in our lives (and more) and engagingly paced. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.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? Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. I think there is something there, and I know that Millner’s work is beloved and most reviews are glowing, but whatever it is it simply did not resonate with me. If you're on the hunt for a good book to reset your own brain, might I suggest Maggie Millner's Couplets: A Love Story ?

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink,” by Edna St. 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.She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor. 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. 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 . She also has of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet.

Breathing, typing these lines, texting a friend, checking the time, thinking it wouldn’t always feel like this, but still, sometimes, it was. This really worked for me with the content, but forced me to rush through, when I really wanted to take my time and savour what was being said. All I know is that it never gets irritating - the ‘you’ is well-delineated enough that I didn’t feel the ‘you’ was a way of forcing me to relate. In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the 'little folds' that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life.

The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire. I've never read a better encapsulation of what it means to question a previously fixed idea of identity and selfhood. 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.

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. essayists (Vivian Gornick) and poets (Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Louise Glück…), with embedded quotations either contextualized within the story or perceptively commented on. A word too easily tossed around, like ‘lyric,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘gripping’—but, here, all are true . I don’t know if my expectations were too high or I was too unfamiliar/personally uninterested with polyamory, or if the structure just lost me, but I didn’t feel like this book had any impact.She's certainly got a gift for storytelling and a clever way with words that helped propel me through this within about an hour or so.