Maggie Millner
“Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.’
“In this riveting debut, Maggie Millner makes the rhyming couplet—that supposedly staid, outmoded vehicle of 18th century moralism—an engine of radical metamorphosis and scorching sex. Couplets plunges us into desire so fierce it overwrites existence, exiling us from the lives we know. This is an endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.”
““An astounding debut. Ugh: astound? A word too easily tossed around, like ‘lyric,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ ‘gripping’—but, here, all are true . . . This is a book that seduces the brain . . . Millner’s couplets enact high-wire acts of wit and poignancy.”
“Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire . . . Tremendously moving . . . In its most thrilling moments, Couplets dwells among the ‘little folds’ that join instinct and decision, and that thereby make up a life.”
““Copulative pleasures abound in this spectacular debut . . . As the perfectly paced narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepens . . . Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement.”
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets (FSG, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.
They are also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
In an interview with the Paris Review, she was asked about when she realized she was writing a book, rather thana series of poems: “I hadn't imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated.”
Maggie was the 2020–'21 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–'20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–'18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where she received her MFA.
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