I think there is something there, and I know that Millner’s work is beloved and most reviews are glowing, but whatever it is it simply did not resonate with me. Sexy, sophisticated, surprising, propulsive, worldly, tender, formally masterful: who knew the nineteenth-century novel would find an astonishing critical efflorescence in poetry, in Brooklyn, in the twenty-first century? This explores the experience of realising you’re queer late in your twenties, sabotaging a relationship, and the sapphic relationship that follows messing with your head.

another reviewer described the reading experience as a fever dream and that description of the reading experience for this felt apt and resonated. the whole style of rhyming couplets just didn't work for me and, honestly, if that's what you're going to do, at least commit to making them rhyme! The continuous, stream-of-consciousness vibe really worked to represent the panic and questioning that comes with this kind of experience. The entirety of the action seems to take place in a little over a year, yet several lifetimes' worth of reflections and experiences are embedded in its pages.Couplets compelled me like a love affair —I didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go to bed, didn’t want to get off the subway, I just wanted to hear the story it was telling, which was, ultimately, a story about form–what are the forms (of intimacy, vocation, domesticity, verse, pleasure) we want to be held by, and to break free from?

Political and poetic considerations of storytelling--the pitfalls of narrativizing one's own life and the lives of others--infuse this absorbing tale of falling out and in and out of love . The brevity of the poems, the subtle nature of the words on paper that refuse to be bracketed and while there is no subjectivity at all, there is a memoir in all of this somewhere.I'm always here for queer literature, so that's initially what drew me to this as I was unfamiliar with Maggie Millner's previous work.

She offers a philosophy of sexuality as an expansive force: an organization of pleasure that refutes neoliberalism's demand for incessant labor.A dazzling, feather-light tour de force— witty and effervescent and insightful, and so sexy, and so real. 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. The entire story is told in rhyming couplets and so it was a real treat to listen to this on audiobook and read by the author.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. For a woman who has only known how to love men, suddenly falls in love with women, and that's when the storytelling tone changes - the personal also becomes political, and the question of falling in and out of love is not just experiential. The story itself is interesting and would’ve been sooo much better, maybe even a mild banger, had it not been written using poems.And I knew my sneering hauteur was its own repellent, habit: an itchy frock I wore to parties, where I made small talk about book reviews and carbon capture while down below the surface of our banter, I’d feel a sheet of rime steadily start to form between me and my counterpart”. All I know is that it never gets irritating - the ‘you’ is well-delineated enough that I didn’t feel the ‘you’ was a way of forcing me to relate. Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire .