Review: 'Milk and honey' by rupi kaur

Title: milk and honey

Author: rupi kaur

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Year: 2015

Pages: 208

IBSN-13: 9781449474256

Price: 10.36 (Paperback amazon)

Mark: 10/10

SYNOPSIS

#1 New York Times bestseller Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. About the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

The book is divided 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.

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

JUSTIFICATION

It’s been a veeery long time since I wanted to read something written by rupi kaur, I had her two books in my Amazon’s wishlist during a lot of time. I had read so many good critics about her and her poetry so when I was in Oslo I found this book in a bookshop and, even though the price was more expensive than in Amazon, I bought it. I didn’t hesitate. I waited to be at home in Spain and to finish the book I was reading at that time in order to enjoy it. And I indeed enjoy it, so much that I devoured it in one afternoon.

PLOT

Milk and honey is a collection of poems very different from the ones we are used to read.  The length of the poems varies so much, we find poems constituted by two lines or much longer poems. The poems are organized in four main topics: the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing. In them she explores matters like the absence of a paternal figure, the raping, the lack of love, but she also talks about love, sorority and about the most important topic: self-esteem.

WRITING STYLE

rupi kaur is special. She writes in a way that touches you, she transmits so much with four verses, six words, or with a picture supporting the text. It has brief poems and long poems, but all of them touches you in the same way. Some of the topics are very hard to read, the absence of a paternal figure, the raping… and others are very beautiful like love, sorority, resilience. Because of the division of the book in four sections/topics the reading is easy. She also defies the grammar laws not using punctuation, just full stops, she doesn’t use capital letters, and these two aspects make her poems visually beautiful and attractive.

GENERAL COMMENT

It’s been a long time since I haven’t read any collection of poems (including the ones I have read in the B.A.) that made me fall in love, that kept me so hooked and that transmitted so much as hard as this collection made. What she has made me feel was similar as I have felt when reading Emily Dickinson. Although with a big different, I think I have understood better to rupi because she is a contemporary writer, she has a similar age as me, and we have went through some similar traumas. Even so, her poetry touches you. Besides the aesthetics of her book (not using capital letters and just using full stops), the majority of her poems are supported by some drawings made by herself that embellished them. Here you have her instagram where she uses to upload some of her poems, here you have one of my favourite:

-Saru.