Couplets are seductive, but a dangerous lilt, as too much of this good could easily tilt to light verse. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with fun! Millner’s not shy of whimsy and singsong ... Her puns punctuate, rather than dictate. They’re best when they’re inevitable, part of the substrate instead of spotlit (as in the line break 'in Bed-Stuy with our playlist on': too cleverly said) ... Though Couplets could be viewed from some angles as a novel, this book is straight-up as formal poetry as it can be, while, simultaneously, queering all binaries.

Millner explores what happens when the ferocity of wanting is bound by the restraint of form ... Millner depicts a woman fully awakened to the possibilities of being alive, despite the shackles on her hands, mind and heart. Keeping the stakes high on every page, Millner transcends the tawdry to ask readers, obliquely, whether they are sleepwalking through their days ... Millner delights in the small pivots and grooves afforded by strict verse. Even the line breaks provide fractals of the fractured themes of longing, grief, hope and passion. Restless, imaginative and daring, Couplets advances the canon of the erotic.

Stand further back from the passage and you can see the poet herself laying out the parts she’s been given, finding the 'hundred screws,' the 'plastic pegs,' the words with which she’ll make those parts into a serviceable whole. As anyone who has assembled a piece of ikea furniture knows, things rarely line up perfectly, and what you’re left with is something you can live with but also something that will never entirely conceal that you are the one who put it together. Rhyme is working that way here ... What Millner has built, after all, is not a bed but a poem, one that wants you to notice its own discomfort in its anachronistic, unfashionable form ... If the tendency of rhyme, like that of desire, is to pull distant things together and force their boundaries to blur, then the countervailing force in this book, the one that makes it go, is the impulse toward narrative ... Millner’s ultimate achievement is to draw open the distance between the book’s first line and its ostensibly identical second, between the self that one takes as given and the self, no less true, that one cannot help but make.

With Millner’s well-attuned sense of metaphor, we know we are in good hands. Her verse is neat and supple ... Couplets is, yes, written in couplets, intermingled with sections of prose poetry. While couplets might recall the heroic verses of Geoffrey Chaucer or Alexander Pope, the word couplet in French can also mean a piece that is part of a hinge, a joint — a joining of two. Given this choice, I wondered if Millner’s poems would study the form of the couple, that standard that often defines love. And while Couplets does concern itself with romantic pairs... Millner has her eye not so much on the couple form per se, submitting to or resisting its allure, but on queerness as a form one inhabits. How does one form oneself as queer? ... While there is an air of destiny to the narrator’s first queer relationship, Couplets is suffused with the terrifying implications of creative will. You can shape your life — either through language or through love.

Millner’s book, which follows the arc of two love affairs, also queers the confessional poem, using formal strictures to enable candor ... In rhyming couplets that zigzag down the page like urban fire escapes and in prose poems that visually mimic trapdoors, she narrates her exit from common-law marriage and monogamy — conventions thought to domesticate desire ... Although some couplets, elsewhere in the book, fall flat or seem fatuous — a rhyme, for instance, between “the bagels” and “practicing your Kegels” — the pattern of echoes is generally pleasing ... Millner’s use of the second-person draws the reader further into the experience. We are conscripted, in propria persona, as we confess and adjudicate, narrate and editorialize ... Millner seeks communion with readers with whom she might share a privileged conversation, a confessional that does not aim at absolution but 'proof of life […] in the aching.'