Couplets

January 1, 2023
Millner's story-in-verse is a metafictive marvel. Couplets suggest pairs, and Millner's poems are mostly in rhymed couplets. The dualities suggested by this form split into ever finer fractals as the narrative develops. The speaker's comfortable relationship with a man ends when an exciting if unstable woman becomes "the aphrodisiac / of misbehavior" the speaker craves. The love triangle is the mechanism for exploring need and regret. Millner's language is rich and unexpected, with lines like, "The sun moved through a slotted spoon of cloud," and her technique with rhyme is a gorgeous lesson in form, delivering meaning rather than following a rule. Interspersed with the poems are prose sections that change from first to second person. The new voice is analytical and relentless, as though the poems are writing their own critical essay. Even here, Millner often ends with a rhyme, turning prose into sonnets with devastating closure. Couplets is an important book for readers interested in the knotted intersections of form, freedom, queerness, safety, submission, and precision.

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Starred review from January 23, 2023
Copulative pleasures abound in this spectacular debut that cloaks memoir in rhyming couplets and prose poems. The autofictional plot reads like a fairy tale: a woman in Brooklyn leaves her old life with “its familiar openwork/ of sex and teaching, kale and NPR// and the boyfriend at the center I revered,” for a woman, “My eye loved// everything it fell upon./ And then one day it fell upon/ a mirror. And he was nowhere/ in the mirror. And she was everywhere.” Love and lust find uncanny expression under poetic constraints (“isn’t love itself a type// of rhyme?”). The rhymes are at once delicious—at times gasp-worthy—and yet so expertly deployed that they become “a shape that feels more native than imposed.” “Those days, I was something else:// a soft vacuity. A sort of net./ No guilt, no age. No epithet.” As the perfectly paced narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepens; love becomes “the engine of self-knowledge.” Exploring the question of how exactly to tell her story, the poet admits: “Sometimes when you sat down, alone with your mind, you felt you were performing both parts of an elaborate duet.” Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.

March 15, 2023
A 20-something Brooklynite remakes the form and function of love in this story told in rhyming couplets. The speaker of this novel in verse is, at first, enviably settled in her life. She enjoys her job teaching composition; she loves her boyfriend; she feels "if not exactly pride, at least the pretty, / riskless pleasure of conformity." Then she meets an electrifying woman who sweeps her into a tumultuous, explosively erotic relationship. Through a series of discrete stanzas, themselves portioned into rhyming couplets, the speaker narrates the dissolution of her relationship with her boyfriend and the charged early months of her new love affair, which vivifies all the quotidian objects of her life even as it plunges her into sincere mourning for all that was lost in the breakup with the man she "revered / but felt [she] had been failing many years." The author's formal choices underscore the thematic obsessions of the book. The rhyming couplets create conversations within themselves, each line echoing the other's language in sonic duets reminiscent of the ways couples reflect each other's identities. The conceit is clever, and the verse itself is full of startling, effervescent imagery--not to mention full-throated eroticism--that is a pleasure to read. However, the only fully realized character in this tightly controlled exploration of identity and desire is the speaker herself. Perhaps this is the result of the form, which reflects the boyfriend and the lover as elements of the speaker's own voice; perhaps it is a more deliberate flattening, illustrating the speaker's statement that "love / has been, above all things, the engine of / self-knowledge in my life." Regardless, the relentless interiority restricts the reader's engagement to only those things that illustrate the speaker's blooming selfhood. All other characters become symbols of the speaker's progress through her journey of self-realization rather than people in their own rights. Which leaves the reader to ask how much more real or nuanced our narrator could have seemed if the characters that accompany her transformation were afforded the same ability to look into their own mirrors. A bold reengagement with the novel's time-tested staple subject: romantic love.

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