Couplets: A Love Story

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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? She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism’s demand for incessant labor. And I knew my sneering hauteur was its own repellent, habit: an itchy frock I wore to parties, where I made small talk about book reviews and carbon capture while down below the surface of our banter, I’d feel a sheet of rime steadily start to form between me and my counterpart”. 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. I think this is a good segue into poetry if you struggle with it as there is more of a plot to this book.

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? For a woman who has only known how to love men, suddenly falls in love with women, and that's when the storytelling tone changes - the personal also becomes political, and the question of falling in and out of love is not just experiential.

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? A dazzling, feather-light tour de force—witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. The affair thrusts her from an outwardly conventional life into queerness, polyamory, kink, and unalloyed, consuming desire.

Kink and queerness, power and polyamory— this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all. 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. Poetry expreses the anxiety and delirium of love really well and it fit well with the narrators worries about cheating and heartbreak. 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.

I know every story doesn’t have to be universal and it’s better to lead with empathy, but so much of the ‘plot’ felt detached from any feeling at all. It is a novel in verse really, even an autobiographical novel if you please, which perhaps makes it so much more intimate, and special.