It's a story of romantic attachment and romantic betrayal told almost entirely in rhymed couplets, and it's a balancing act of such sly virtuosity that it may give you vertigo. And parallel to the metamorphosing forms of literary narratives the narrator is also undergoing transformations in her self-discovery and sexuality as a woman. Maggie Millner's seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman.

Kink and queerness, power and polyamory— this debut by the senior editor of the Yale Review has it all. It’s a story of romantic attachment and romantic betrayal told almost entirely in rhymed couplets, and it’s a balancing act of such sly virtuosity that it may give you vertigo. For a woman who has only known how to love men, suddenly falls in love with women, and that's when the storytelling tone changes - the personal also becomes political, and the question of falling in and out of love is not just experiential.She's interested in the labels we use to define ourselves -- queer, polyamorous, kinky, vanilla -- and what these mean on an emotional level. 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. 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. My eyes would glaze over and I was taking in words without comprehension because it seemed as though they were picked at random. 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.

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.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.

I think this is a good segue into poetry if you struggle with it as there is more of a plot to this book. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. You can sense Millner fracturing rhymes and meters to create lines as iconoclastic as the sexual framework her speaker is struggling to discover. The story itself is interesting and would’ve been sooo much better, maybe even a mild banger, had it not been written using poems.

Maggie Millner’s seductive debut is a novel-in-verse about a woman in her late twenties who leaves a long-term relationship with a boyfriend for another woman. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere.