Couplets: A Love Story

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I don’t mean to break my personal rule of not praising books for their length but it’s a very quick read.

Political and poetic considerations of storytelling--the pitfalls of narrativizing one's own life and the lives of others--infuse this absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love . One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life.

The entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes’ worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages. It felt like an outline of a life with a bunch of ideas projected onto relationships after they were over.

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”. She's certainly got a gift for storytelling and a clever way with words that helped propel me through this within about an hour or so.

In her luminous, electric debut, Millner creates an original form to express the headlong revelations, obsessions, and erotic geometry of love. Sexy, sophisticated, surprising, propulsive, worldly, tender, formally masterful: who knew the nineteenth-century novel would find an astonishing critical efflorescence in poetry, in Brooklyn, in the twenty-first century? A love story in verse and prose, “Couplets” is already attracting a swell of critical and popular attention.