Rant Review: The poetry of Rupi Kaur

milk and honey

Type: Poetry collection

Genre: Feminism

Back Cover: "milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache.

milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look."

Read Time: 1 hour

Rating: 1 star

the sun and her flowers

Type: Poetry collection

Genre: Romance

Back Cover: ""Rupi Kaur is the Writer of the Decade." -- The New Republic

From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one's roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.

Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms. 

this is the recipe of life

said my mother

as she held me in her arms as i wept

think of those flowers you plant

in the garden each year 

they will teach you

that people too

must wilt

fall

root

rise

in order to bloom"

Read Time: 1 hour

Rating: 1.5 stars

home body

Type: Poetry collection

Genre: Romance

Back Cover: "Rupi Kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.

i dive into the well of my body

and end up in another world

everything i need

already exists in me

there’s no need

to look anywhere else

– home"

Read Time: 1 hour

Rating: 1.25 stars

Review

This was a poor introduction to poetry. I don't read poetry often, and after having read these three collections, I still haven't read that much poetry. I would characterize the vast majority of these "poems" as Instagram captions. It's Tumblr poetry at its finest, in that it's not good at all but tries so hard to be deep. It's poetry that would fit very well on r/Im14AndThisIsDeep. Let me give an example of the "poetry" in this book:

man who cries -the gift

Yep, that's a real poem in the sun and her flowers. And the worst thing is, that poem is more or less characteristic of 99% of the poems in these three collections. Seriously, a lot of the time it feels like I'm reading the same poem over and over and over again. I'm not, but it feels like I am and in poetry, feeling is pretty damn important.

There are two and a half things that really bother me about this. First, and this is the one and a half because these two things kind of go together, but Kaur takes herself super seriously as a poet. She writes truly mediocre poetry, but her appearances - either at readings or in interviews or even on her TikTok - show that she really believes that she is hot shit who can write amazing, insightful, deep poetry. It's the delusion that gets me. But the crazy thing is that she's so self-deluded that she managed to delude publishers into publishing not just one, but three truly mediocre poetry collections when there are actual good poets out there fighting for recognition. It's infuriating.

The second thing that bugs me is that every once in a while, there will be a good poem in there. Sometimes it's about serious issues, like sexual assault. Other times, it's about Kaur's identity and complicated relationship with her family and her heritage. In those poems, Kaur proves that she actually is capable of writing good poetry. If she took a little time to consolidate some poems, edit, and write longer form poems exploring issues personal to her, she could have a solid poetry collection. Instead, she would rather write Instagram captions and call it a day. It's disappointing and infuriating.

I would not recommend any of these collections to anyone. There are much, much better poetry collections to explore, and after the poetry collections I read in April, I think I'm absolutely done with the genre of Instagram caption poetry.