Couplets: A Love Story

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I mean I enjoyed it — the conversations — thoughts about lust, power, beliefs, modern life — dating, sexing, suffering,… from the context that perhaps poetry represented one woman’s life-force. In a fragment near the beginning of A Lover’s Discourse (1977), Roland Barthes outlines a phenomenon he calls annulation, or annulment: an “explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself: by a specifically amorous perversion, it is love the subject loves, not the object.” This process necessitates the disenfranchisement or desubjectification of love-objects (the beloveds) so that lovers may reinstate themselves at the center of power. It’s a self-defense mechanism deployed to prevent, dislodge, or defer the kind of meaningful vulnerability or injury that attends the loss of loved ones. Reading Barthes on love calls to mind another great French interrogator of desire, Annie Ernaux, who, at the end of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat, considers that their coupling had become “a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art.” She documents the liaison’s raptures and griefs to calibrate the unruly feeling between them. Art tames. Abandoned to the annihilations of the affair’s end, Ernaux molds the rubble into a story, becoming god of her own suffering.

For Millner, this question only led to more questions, which spring unbidden to the mind of her protagonist—a woman living in Brooklyn in her late-20s, dating a man toward whom she feels a sense of profound, if filial, affection. Thus far, she’s been able to suppress her desire to experiment with women, ignoring the increasingly homoerotic fantasies that surface in her dreams—at least, until an accidental meet-cute leads her to embark on an all-consuming affair. Millner's ultimate achievement is to draw open the distance between the book's first line and its ostensibly identical second, between the self that one takes as given and the self, no less true, that one cannot help but make.' Kamran Javadizadeh, New YorkerCouplets 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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions.” Such a continuity need not be mapped as tragedy. Couplets is most compelling when the narrator writes her history of love not as a linear sequence but as an atemporal, echoic triangulation of desire—one in which her past and future lovers overlap, interpenetrate, and commune. In fights with the woman (now the narrator’s girlfriend), she finds herself parroting “the same old // dialectic I’d tried to leave behind” with the ex, but there are other, more generative remainders that have followed her across time, too, into this new coupling. In soothing her girlfriend through depressive episodes, she confesses, “I was drawing from the well / of love he filled.” The narrator becomes “a kind of conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted // with my mouth.” In these moments, the transpositional capacities of intimacy take on a wiser, more tender quality, and what has chiefly been a mechanically narrative queering of the narrator’s experience appears emotionally stranger and more textually surprising. The passage is also a powerful instance of reversal: here, it is the lovers who transform the narrator into their shared story, not she who subordinates them to hers. 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. She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism's demand for incessant labor.' Heather Treseler, Los Angeles Review of Books 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.” An astounding debut.”–Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book ReviewA dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undoneA woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real.One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. 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.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. In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships–the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments–and how the people we love can show us who we truly are. and “An endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.”–Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner – eBook Details

A stunning debut, an instant classic . . . Sexy, sophisticated, surprising, propulsive, worldly, tender, formally masterful: who knew the nineteenth-century novel would find an astonishing critical efflorescence in poetry, in Brooklyn, in the twenty-first century?” The title of the book, Couplets , is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions. Reading it was a thrill, a rearrangement of my psychic molecules.’ Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn 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? I cannot remember the last time I was this gripped by a voice or its questions. Reading it was a thrill, a rearrangement of my psychic molecules.” The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms? There's an intensity that is intrinsic in LGBTQIA+ lit, particularly involving two cis women, likely because emotions run very high in these relationships (yes, higher than in straight relationships, in my experience). Millner really conveyed the push/pull of these connections well, and I loved that.

Right now, Millner is in between tours; it’s a brief moment of repose, and her demeanor is warm and open. After a couple glasses of wine, the conversation turns from poetry—the author discusses her upbringing in a small town in rural upstate New York, her academic experiences, and a certain inclination for overthinking. (At one point, she admits to having sent a multi-paragraph apology text to a friend for “being awkward” when she was handed a slice of birthday cake, to which the friend responded, “HAHAHA.”)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.” It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end. A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them. Then she asked you to share a cab with her; you did; she asked you to walk her in; you did; she asked you to come upstairs; you did; to get into her bed; you did; to press yourself lengthwise against her; you did; […] to remove your pants; you did; to let her taste you; you did; to come again, inside her mouth; you did […]

Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . . . Tremendously moving . . . In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the ‘little folds’ that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life.”It’s divided into four books. Yet I really couldn’t tell the difference in tone, style, or themes between Did you feel any tension in relaying a coming-out story that mirrored aspects of your own experience as a queer writer? Part of the project of poetry is that of arresting time, of reminding us of the material qualities of language and the material properties of our lives.”