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3.74 AVERAGE
3.74 AVERAGE
emotional
inspiring
quuer and honest đź’“
I loved the writing, symbolism and narration style (switching from first to second person)
"Sexuality is,
after all, a formal concern:
finding for one’s time on earth
a shape that feels more native than imposed— a shape in which desire, having chosen it, can multiply."
I loved the writing, symbolism and narration style (switching from first to second person)
"Sexuality is,
after all, a formal concern:
finding for one’s time on earth
a shape that feels more native than imposed— a shape in which desire, having chosen it, can multiply."
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
It was okay? Some sections were very pretty verse, and I like the overarching message/themes of searching for one’s identity, but at the end of the day, it didn’t stick with me, and I would probably not pick it up again.
I would love any book that name checks Natalia Ginzburg and Vivian Gornick.
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Maggie Millner's Couplets is a novel-in-verse that explores the fierce intensity of falling in love and how it affects one's expression, especially when the initial excitement begins to falter and fail. This debut reads like a challenge to form itself: can desire, betrayal, and queer longing be woven into the rigid dance of couplets without dulling their edge or dimming their jagged shine? Miraculously, musically, the answer is yes.
Here, an unnamed narrator—anchored by habit to a boyfriend both familiar and fading—plunges headlong into an affair with a magnetic older woman, drawn by the raw gravity of new desire. What begins as a bright rupture soon grows knotted and rough: shame, self-questioning, the anxious rewriting of the self in search of a truer script. Millner captures the exhilarating rise of infatuation with a poet's sharpened precision. She also portrays the gradual erosion of certainty with a storyteller's hunger for ache and truth.
The couplets themselves are never ornamental. They reflect the novel's deeper tensions: two lines yoked by attraction, expectation, sound, and sense. Their rhymes are at turns tender or jagged, slipping loose or locking tight. When rhyme feels effortless, it becomes dangerous and deceptive; it creates a sonic echo of alluring surfaces, revealing how ease can shimmer at the lip of threat. When rhyme strains or snaps—under friction, under force—it carries the sting of consequence: the pattern buckling under the weight of real life. Millner, skilled as a composer, knows exactly when to tune the music, when to fracture it, and when to let the seams unravel.
Millner blurs the boundary between poetry and prose, paralleling how her narrator navigates the blurred lines between intention and impulse. Some passages slip into almost conversational clarity; others flare into dizzying lyricism. Even the book’s most musical moments feel like strategic self-constructions, as the narrator tries—and sometimes fails—to shape a story clean enough to believe in. The tightness of the couplets becomes its own quiet confession: that the narrator’s language, like her love, can sometimes be untrustworthy.
There’s breathtaking intimacy in how Couplets renders queerness—not just the fevered dream of first queer love but the slow heartbreak of remapping oneself around that love. In Millner’s hands, queerness is less a revelation than a destabilization— not a fixed arrival point, but an open wound, a reordering still in progress. The narrator's shifting relationship to her own language—how she confesses, conceals, and reconceives—proves as tense and as tender as her relationships with others. And when the rhymes begin to fracture, it feels less like a literary experiment and more like a human heart stuttering, an identity unspooling with uneven breath and a terrible, breathless honesty.
If you’re looking for a triumphant coming-out story, Couplets may challenge your expectations, but it does so with exquisite beauty. It reveals what survives after reinvention's shimmering promise gives way to the messier music of real life: loneliness, contradiction, and the half-songs of longing we hum. This is a book about falling apart and the fragile, ferocious labour of becoming again.
Millner leaves the ending tender, unfinished, and true to the story's belief that becoming is never a clean victory, only an endless, vulnerable act of persistence. She has written this tale for anyone who loved badly but dreamed defiantly, for anyone whose story was too wild, too intimate, too unfinished to ever fully master its telling. She offers us harmony and fracture, resonance and rawness, and in the process she creates something so clear and searingly honest that it aches.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Infidelity, Toxic relationship
adventurous
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A beautifully crafted story told through poetry about a woman experiencing devastating love twice at the same time. She explores a poly sapphic relationship immediately after leaving her longtime boyfriend.
fast-paced
I went into this hoping it’d change my mind into liking poetry. In some instances it succeeded, the imagery was beautiful and insightful. However, I think I just prefer prose to poetry.
I liked the subject matter and thought it was an interesting way to read about romance and coming out, but again I just don’t think poetry is for me unfortunately. I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if I had listened to it rather than read it.
I liked the subject matter and thought it was an interesting way to read about romance and coming out, but again I just don’t think poetry is for me unfortunately. I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if I had listened to it rather than read it.