An astounding debut. -Adrienne Raphel The New York Times Book Review A dazzling love story in
poems about one woman's coming-out coming-of-age and coming undone A woman lives an ordinary
life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing
style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women of kissing a friend in
a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private not real. One night she meets another woman at
a bar and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. 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. Maggie Millner's captivating
seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession gender identity and the art
and act of literary transformation. 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. An endlessly inventive wise exhilarating book. -Garth Greenwell author of
Cleanness and What Belongs to You
