Couplets: A Love Story

Couplets is a memoir-in-verse about a young writer who upends a stable life after falling for a woman she can’t get out of her system. She tries to negotiate open rules, then monogamy, then their opposite again, and learns how quickly desire changes the geometry of everything. The book moves from city bars to family holidays, from poly schedules to quiet rooms where poems and arguments share the air. Along the way, she loses a partner she thought she’d keep forever, stares at the parts of herself she’d rather not, and discovers pleasure as a kind of information. This performance retells that journey in clear, spoken language. We follow the crush, the break, and the voice that survives. It’s tender, funny, and bracingly honest about sex, jealousy, and the need to claim a self that fits. If you’ve ever felt late to your own life, this story will feel like recognition.

• Listeners who enjoy intimate, voice-driven memoirs about queer desire and identity
• Anyone navigating open relationships, breakups, or a second adolescence in adulthood
• Writers and readers who like literature about literature—Audre Lorde, Woolf, Cather, Eliot—woven into real life

Maggie Millner grew up in rural upstate New York. She teaches writing at Yale and serves as a senior editor at The Yale Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Couplets is her first book.