Couplets

An electrifying queer awakening, novel-in-verse

'An astounding debut . . . a book that seduces the brain . . . Millner's couplets enact high-wire acts of wit and poignancy.' New York Times

'I've never read a better encapsulation of what it means to question a previously fixed idea of identity and selfhood.' Vogue

'Millner's ultimate achievement is to draw open the distance . . .between the self that one takes as given and the self, no less true, that one cannot help but make.' New Yorker

'Millner is brilliant at showing how early moments of lust can be existentially unmooring. . . Couplets is deft, delicate and unexpectedly fun.' Guardian

'Maggie Millner's Couplets absolutely blew me away. Breathing new life into that most familiar of poetic forms, she recounts the difficulties inherent in making ourselves vulnerable to another person with precision and guile.' James Conor Patterson, Poetry Society, Books of the Year

Maggie Millner's electrifying debut is a coming-of-age love story, a story of coming out and a story of coming apart. A woman in her late twenties 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.

Written in rhyming couplets with disarming frankness, what ensues is an exploration of obsession, gender, identity-making, sexual experiment, and the art and act of literary transformation.