Couplets Author Maggie Millner Can't Help But Break the Rules
I first encountered Maggie Millner while crammed into the back of a reading at NYU. The acoustics in the room weren’t great, but she read with the kind of presence that carried to my far corner of the West Village brownstone. Millner was reading a new piece, which she casually described as a “work in progress,” free-verse and analytical, interweaving references to film theory with a direct and personal narrative about friendship. Her debut book, Couplets, out in paperback next month, is on its surface truly regulated by poetic convention. It’s written mostly in rhyming couplets, though it forays into prose poetry. Millner, as she told me on Zoom last month, is “temperamentally compelled” to break the rules. True to form, the subject matter of Couplets reveals the title to be a twisted pun. The momentum of Millner’s rhyme drives forward a narrative of coupling and uncoupling, as its young female speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend who happens to have anoth