Couplets: A Love Story

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink,” by Edna St. From an artistic standpoint, the perfection of Millner’s aesthetic choices raise the erotic, emotional, and existential mess of a personal awakening toward the epic. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. told in rhyming couplets, this short novel follows a young woman as she embarks on her first queer relationship. 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.

In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships—the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments—and how the people we love can show us who we truly are.She also has of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. In a moment of introspection, she says, “I saw a person who kissed mostly men, / wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat. It’s a very short book but there were lots of lines that took me out of the reading experience completely. I am unfamiliar with both and therefore didn't know what to expect, but I was initially hooked by the cover and the description of “a dazzling love story in poems about one woman’s coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone.

The internet, whose central purpose seemed to be to turn the best parts of humanity—our hungers for belongings, art, and sex— into surveillance logs and payouts for execs. She falls into a consuming affair--into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.It wasn’t a story that felt lost, exactly, but more that everything together held no importance to me. Couplets is propulsive, poignant, and terrific at showing the way carnality is tethered to vulnerability. but then she uses that to talk about how your experience changes when you externalize it, so even that aspect worked. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Breathing, typing these lines, texting a friend, checking the time, thinking it wouldn’t always feel like this, but still, sometimes, it was.

A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. 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 . And parallel to the metamorphosing forms of literary narratives the narrator is also undergoing transformations in her self-discovery and sexuality as a woman. While desire is, no doubt, this book’s throbbing taxi, Millner’s consistent modulation of tone and perspective safeguards the book from the claustrophobia of erotic quest. Couplets is a dazzling fusion of form and content, chronicling the strictures, structures and pitfalls of relationships – the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments.Millner's verse is neat, simple - with all the heartache, the longing, the confusion of falling in love with another woman, and then to explore all levels of love - the obsessive, to fear, to envy, and how to become yourself at the end. Couplets is also about memory, of forgetfulness, of loves requited and unrequited, of shared experiences, of how we bond over and over again, while it is a book about two, it is a book about many, about all of us. Lovers of horny, rhyming poetry rejoice: Millner’s ‘love story in poems’ arrives a week before Valentine’s Day, just in time to tie your brain to its bedposts. Overall, I really hate writing negative reviews and I’m glad to see that most people seem to be enjoying this one!