Couplets
Ratings6
Average rating3.8
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.
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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.
My first reading of “rhyming couplets and prose vignettes.” I didn't know what to expect.
Unfortunately, this didn't work for me at all.
Poetry is okay-ish and sometimes I liked the vignettes more than the poetry. It was overkill at many places. Never felt attached to the plot or characters, but still would give 3.5 stars for the structure and attempt.
