The New Yorker:

In “Couplets,” Maggie Millner uses rhyme, confession, and surprising metaphor to create a fresh portrait of desire.

By Kamran Javadizadeh 

Rhyme, like love, is embarrassing. Ludicrous to think that the word you mean is one that happens to share a final sound with one you’ve just used. What sense does that make? What sense does it make, moreover, that any person, even one with whom you share a bed, should shape your life?

And yet sometimes, quite apart from anything you intend, that is how it goes. When it does—when, say, you find yourself in love with someone new—you might wonder not only who this other person is but who you are, who you have become, who you ever were. Such is the experience recounted (in rhyme!) by the poet Maggie Millner in her new book, “Couplets: A Love Story”:

Some mornings, leaving my girlfriend’s
    house, I’d glimpse my whole existence,
all its eras, as a single arc—unified, unbroken.
    I saw a person who kissed mostly men,
wrote poems in the prevailing style, owned a cat.
    I saw a different person after that.

All of these are rhyming couplets, but in the first two the rhyme is imperfect, slant. (Technically speaking, in English, for one line to rhyme with another, both the vowel sound in the final stressed syllable and anything that follows it must be identical.) In the third couplet, though, the rhyme clicks neatly into place, as though to announce the different person—no longer, evidently, writing her poems in “the prevailing style”—whom this poet has become.

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