Couplets, Maggie Millner

This is a long poem, told in mostly rhyming couplets, about a woman who blows her life up by leaving her (seemingly very kind and understanding) boyfriend to pursue an intense love affair with another woman. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself, at times, about how it’s such a quintessentially “cool New Yorker” kind of story. Like, it verges on a caricature of how people imagine bohemian urban life, wandering around eating bagels and quoting critical theory and focusing on your own desires. Thankfully, the book is also self-aware enough to recognize that and more generally, to acknowledge, firmly, what a tremendous privilege it is to be able to agonize about pursuing your passions in this way. And to write poetry about it! But meanwhile, I really liked the poetry. And I think the auto-theory/fiction/poetry-ness of it is genuinely interesting (but I’m a sucker for this stuff). It’s a cool book.