Couplets: A Love Story

£9.9
FREE Shipping

Couplets: A Love Story

Couplets: A Love Story

RRP: £99
Price: £9.9
£9.9 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

Kink and queerness, power and polyamory— this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all. Couplets compelled me like a love affair --I didn't want to eat, didn't want to go to bed, didn't want to get off the subway, I just wanted to hear the story it was telling, which was, ultimately, a story about form-what are the forms (of intimacy, vocation, domesticity, verse, pleasure) we want to be held by, and to break free from? The nature writing was very beautiful and the balance between poetic abstraction and storytelling worked really well.

Read it quick because it's mostly composed of couplets (no surprise there, haha), but its length did not detract from the story at all. Millner's story-in-verse--trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point--centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself. My eyes would glaze over and I was taking in words without comprehension because it seemed as though they were picked at random. Starts with a lot of references to a particular kind of life in Brooklyn but then relaxes and becomes quite heartfelt and sincere (without taking itself too seriously).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. Breathing, typing these lines, texting a friend, checking the time, thinking it wouldn’t always feel like this, but still, sometimes, it was. She also has of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. Couplets is propulsive, poignant, and terrific at showing the way carnality is tethered to vulnerability. Couplets is chock-full of lines and phrases that can stop a reader in their tracks… I’ve never read a better encapsulation of what it means to question a previously fixed idea of identity and selfhood.

It was both invisible and everywhere like the wealth gap or the ozone layer and foiled any threat of our collectivizing. The brevity of the poems, the subtle nature of the words on paper that refuse to be bracketed and while there is no subjectivity at all, there is a memoir in all of this somewhere. told in rhyming couplets, this short novel follows a young woman as she embarks on her first queer relationship. I don’t know if my expectations were too high or I was too unfamiliar/personally uninterested with polyamory, or if the structure just lost me, but I didn’t feel like this book had any impact. There's an intensity that is intrinsic in LGBTQIA+ lit, particularly involving two cis women, likely because emotions run very high in these relationships (yes, higher than in straight relationships, in my experience).

She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism's demand for incessant labor.

Playful, clever, lovestruck, griefstruck, its narrator dances a tightrope of her own invention with captivating passion and skill. I felt for the character -- in many ways I think about sexuality similarly, so perhaps that's why (and sexuality is the main thread/theme/etc of the work). I think she encapsulates stuff like desire and power in relationships so precisely, but perhaps it’s the closes precision that made it hard to feel anything actually. If you’re on the hunt for a good book to reset your own brain, might I suggest Maggie Millner’s Couplets: A Love Story? I especially admired the sections on sex and intimacy: Milner captures the physicality of the body, and the overwhelming sensations of lust and need in a compelling and rich way.

I loved this narrator who was both naive and cynical, innocent and knowing, hopeful and world weary. This explores the experience of realising you’re queer late in your twenties, sabotaging a relationship, and the sapphic relationship that follows messing with your head.

I can recognize that this was at the very least well written but I found it a little convoluted at times. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink,” by Edna St. Giving it 3 stars as I don’t think this is a book which will stick with me but whilst I listened to it I did really enjoy it and found the poetry really pleasant to experience. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force-- witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real . Milner looks at the cataclysmic feeling at the end of a relationship, and explores the awakening of lust and intimacy in lush, sensual detail.In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the 'little folds' that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life. the speaker is living a somewhat regular life with her long time boyfriend, when she meets a woman at a bar and decides to enter into her first queer relationship. unlike anything I've ever read before, this delves into queer first loves, desire, toxicity, and picking yourself back up again. A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop