Maggie Millner’s “Couplets”

Maggie Millner joins Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf to discuss her debut book, “Couplets.”

By LARB Radio HourFebruary 10, 2023

Subscribe on Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud

Do you love listening to the LARB Radio Hour? Support the production of this weekly podcast on books, art, and culture. Donate today.

Maggie Millner joins Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf to discuss her debut book, Couplets, a love story in verse, written in alternating chapters of couplets and prose poems. It’s about a woman whose life is good: she has a loving partner, caring friends, organic vegetables, plenty of tote bags. Everything changes when she meets a woman at a bar and falls deeply in love, beginning an intense, consuming affair. What follows is an exploration of selfhood — a body and heart turned inside out. Millner writes about the ways in which we discover ourselves, the power other people have over us, about being both subject and object. Couplets is about relationships, queerness, sex and desire, as well as the very act of writing all of that down and turning it into poetry. 

Also, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of Decent People, returns to recommend What Napolean Could Not Do by DK Nnuro.