Couplets

“ **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***