Milk and Honey ~ Rupi Kaur
★★☆☆☆
i read this in one
sitting
and. i have to say.
i was not
impressed.
—repeating the exact same sentiment for 200 pages doesn't make it more profound.
I know my way around free verse poetry. My mom is a free verse poet that has been recognized internationally. She usually has me read her work before she posts it and we read the work of other poets together all the time. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that judging poetry is a tricky business, but honestly, this just wasn't anything special. It felt less like I was reading poetry and more like I was reading the notes app on her phone. I've heard the sentiment that was repeated over and over again a million times before this, so honestly, this had nothing to say to me that I didn't already know. If this is the first work of poetry someone has read, I can understand it being their favorite, and I do appreciate Kaur for pouring her heart and soul into this, but for me, it just did absolutely nothing.
The majority of the book is one sentence long and is just a paraphrase of all the previous poems. They almost exclusively have to do with sex, which is fine, but when a book is presented to me as a collection about love and family and independence, I don't know, I expect more platonic or familial love than the 2, maybe 3 poems I got, especially when the vast majority are about how sexy some guy is. The first section was promising, but then it sort of devolved from there.
And the "loving" section greatly confused and concerned me, especially that last poem. Am I supposed to see the whole "making up" thing as romantic? Because it made me want to call the police. Maybe it's a precursor for "breaking", but then why wasn't it in that section instead, when it so obviously belonged there? I don't know about you guys, but having sex isn't a good way to end a fight in which you both scream so loudly, the neighbors bang on your door because they're pretty sure one of you is being murdered.
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