Maggie Millner’s ‘Couplets’ explores queerness and change

Poet Maggie Millner, left, sits beside author and Assistant Professor of English Andrea Lawlor, right, at Riffraff Bookstore and Bar, in Providence, RI. Photo courtesy of Kylie Gellatly FP ‘23.

By Emma Watkins ’23

Managing Editor of Content 

“I became myself. / I became myself. / No, I always was myself. / There’s no such person as myself. ” The opening lines of Maggie Millner’s “Proem” reverberate due to both her clever use of exact rhyme and the introduction of the dynamic, ever-changing narrator. On the dust jacket at the opposite end of the book, Millner’s author photo gazes directly into the reader’s face, her reclined posture echoing the ease and intimacy with which her poetry and prose reveal her thoughts on love, queerness, sex, identity and discovery. Millner joined author and Mount Holyoke Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English Andrea Lawlor in conversation at Riffraff Bookstore and Bar in Providence, Rhode Island, on Friday, Feb. 17. In the hour that followed Millner’s selected readings, the two authors, which Millner referred to as “the best possible pairing,” discussed queer literary traditions and the playfulness of experimenting with form. 

“I became myself. / I became myself. / No, I always was myself. / There’s no such person as myself.”

— Maggie Millner

Drawing readers in with an eye-catching mirrored title and a bright red and pink cover, Millner’s 2023 debut, “Couplets,” proclaims itself a love story. At the reading, Millner wore a bright pink tube top that echoed the color saturation of her book. According to the book’s dust jacket, Millner’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Poetry. Millner’s website lists her as “a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.”

According to the book’s synopsis, the main character of “Couplets” finds an “escape hatch” from her life and begins an exploration of “queerness, polyamory, kink, power, and loss, humiliation and freedom.” With descriptions from critics referring to the book as “sexy” and “seductive,” readers can expect a glimpse into the physical realm of Millner’s love story, but “Couplets” offers much more than that. Millner carefully yet boldly explores feelings of uncertainty, anticipation, attraction and self-discovery by intimating the hot-yet-tender moments of a new relationship while also candidly discussing the hauntings that a past love can leave. 

The main speaker’s voice contains contradictions — witty and poignant, irreverent and reflective. Millner showcases this style in the poem “4.4.” The speaker addresses their class of students stating, “Evidence / must precede argument. Verbs are the heaviest / lifters. Change is constant and inexorable. / The Oxford comma isn’t really optional. / You will fall in love. The relationship / will end, though not at the same instant / as the love. Some version of this will continue, / maybe forever, happening to you.” 

Millner explained that through writing in heroic couplets, she unexpectedly found her own escape hatch from feeling, in her own words, “restless with the contemporary lyric poem.” When explaining her choice to write a book in this style, Millner stated that she was interested in playing with poetic history and tradition but didn’t initially intend to write this book in rhyming couplets. She noted that couplets as a form “enact closure” due to the way that the rhyming pairs complete each other before the next group of lines. She explained that the process of writing this book was a cycle of “push [and] pull between continuation and closure that allowed her to experiment with the “subtleties of syntactic flow.” Lawlor and Millner both agreed that this kind of writing allows for a “queer[ing of one’s] syntax” that can be “playful” and “campy.” Millner described couplets as an “infectious” form, prompting Lawlor to reference Adrienne Raphel’s review of the book for The New York Times — which was written entirely in rhyming couplets. 

Millner is clearly passionate about the craft of her poems and spoke excitedly about the writing process. Kelsey Warren FP ’25, a Mount Holyoke student who attended the event, appreciated how Millner dug into her book’s creation. “It’s exciting to hear from a writer whose work cracks open the genre binary and moreover get some insight into how Millner navigated the tension between poetry and prose, as well as her journey to letting the content find its form: experimentation and openness,” Warren said. “The talk reminded me that a book doesn’t always know what it wants to be when you begin it and to delight in the process.”