MAGGIE MILLNER MUST be on some kind of fast track for poets. Not only did her first book get published by Farrar Straus Giroux...not only did it feature blurbs from the likes of Leslie Jamison, Elif Batuman, and Garth Greenwell....but it got reviewed (favorably) in the NYRB, of all places, a publication that notices maybe six books of poetry a year.
The book is organized into four sections of twelve poems each, with a "Proem" at the beginning and a "coda" at the end, for a nice round total of fifty. Most of the poems are in couplets, the rhymes ranging from straightforward (bed/head) to whimsical (Gornick/romantic) to hold-on-does-that-count? (today/persuaded)--these all occur in the opening lines of 4.11. My favorite was bagels/Kegels, from "Coda."
Each section has a few prose poems written in the second person, with the "you" seeming to be the same person as the "I" in the couplet poems. There's a lovely one about making a Cather pilgrimage to Red Cloud.
Couplets' fast start may have to do with its being a relatively undemanding read (relative to, say, Alice Notley or Rosmarie Waldrop) or with its having the narrative arc of a memoir/novel/autofiction, tracking the end of the speaker's long-term relationship with a man she has known since college out west and the growth of a relationship with a woman she has met in New York City. That relationship has ended, too, by the the end of Couplets, but the book's conclusion strikes a note of affirmation and gratitude for both relationships.
I can see this being a hit with more ambitious book clubs.
I wonder whether Millner will stick with poetry, though. I see her making a kind of Patricia Lockwood/Anne Boyer/Maggie Nelson move to prose.
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