Couplets

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.

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.

It made me think a lot about how our relationships shape our lives in large and small ways.

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.

Angsty poetic prose on modern love, life, and sex? Yes, thank you, more please.