By Vicki Li ’18, Arts & Entertainment Editor

The hurting. The loving. The breaking. The healing.

Rupi Kaur’s collection of poetry and prose, published when she was only 22, is a New York Times Bestseller. Praised as a piece of feminist literature, milk and honey intertwines Kaur’s musings with her own beautiful contour drawings, ultimately creating an aesthetically pleasing combination. Her poems’ prolific appearances on social media sites, such as Tumblr and Twitter, are a clear indication of public approval, especially among teenagers. Whereas Kaur’s target audience seems satisfied, other poets are not, including those in the NA community. Ezra Lebovitz ’18 and Katy Kim ’18, both of whom have positions on the executive board of Prisms, had strong opinions on how milk and honey’s mainstream popularity affect the image of the poetry community. Lebovitz says that “a lot of people don’t think poetry is an art form, but it is. There is something to be said about Rupi Kaur’s stylistic unconventionality, but poetry also does require a fair amount of intent and thought.”

Kaur’s poems have been criticized for inserting line breaks into regular sentences in order to turn them into poetry. For example, she writes in one of her poems:

                                                     you

                                                are your own

                                                soulmate

Putting it frankly, she could have simply phrased it as: you are your own soulmate. Katy Kim considers good poetry to be more than just Kaur’s poetry: “It should try to articulate the unnamable and true—that that process should be difficult. Her poems always feel easy to write and replicate. There’s a problematic lack of emotional labor and consideration that a good poem takes in terms of literary merit.” Lebovitz and Kim have both expressed concern over milk and honey’s incomplete representation of poetry. People come to associate poetry with Rupi Kaur’s style and fail to see past that. Lebovitz calls milk and honey a “packaged marketable version of emotional depth”, while Kim encourages aspiring poets to read more contemporary poetry.

Kaur deals with the topics of gender and race in her poems, but many other poets implement the same themes in beautiful and expressive ways rather than reiterating tired ideas from Tumblr posts. milk and honey has become a laughingstock and an object of satire for many who prey on its lack of genuine authenticity. People on social media have been creating parodies of Kaur’s poems, turning a poem like this:

                                                     love is not cruel

                                                we are cruel

                                                love is not a game

                                                we have made a game

                                                out of love

into something like this:

                                                you swiped right

                                                so did i

                                                you never messaged

                                                and neither did i

                                                love

                                                a strange thing

milk and honey constantly oscillates between being devoutly worshipped and being mercilessly ridiculed by readers. Her straightforward and simple style allows her to easily entice readers. However, her “bite-sized poetry” as Katy Kim puts it, isn’t even of her own design. Poets such as Nayyirah Waheed and Warsan Shire have very similar styles to Kaur; milk and honey just happened to be the book that rose to fame and awarded Kaur for her seeming ingenuity. Kaur’s cutesy, mini book has established itself as the archetype of the modern ‘aesthetic’. Her book is strewn across lacquered ash wood tables of your local Urban Outfitters and is the brazen figurehead of the poetry display of Barnes and Noble across the street.

Rupi Kaur has recently released another poetry/prose book called the sun and her flowers. If you’re interested in Kaur’s poems or simply curious to see if she’s changed her style because of the backlash, don’t hesitate to check it out of the library.