milk and honey

This book by Rupi Kaur is among those gigantic few poetry books of the past decade that are responsible for helping mass-popularize poetry among new audiences - namely, people who search through self-affirmation/breakup/trauma hashtags on Instagram.* My thoughts on this book may come across as sounding priggish and judgmental but I'd like to try to assure the reader this is far from the case. Okay - so I really genuinely 100% do not think the poems in this book are that good. Most** read more like a youth's private derivative heartbroken scribbles than anything of any particularly noteworthy originality or heft. That's not to say they're bad - it just requires one to step back and ask what poetry is for - moreso, who it is for.

   I'd say it's for everyone. Does that include people who have never really cared for poetry*** but who share similar traumas to an artist willing enough to expressively carve out the niche of their own struggles and recovery to help others reflect on their fundamental similitude? Yes, absolutely. And those folks, speaking objectively from the sales statistics, wanted a book of poems that apparently didn't exist before this one - and how many people do you think were inspired to process their own traumas, plot out their own paths to wholesomeness, forgiveness, forgetting or wellbeing, through their own bespoke lenses of creative writing - by this very book? The figures here don't even bear estimating but by my very asking even if the answer were to be Just One you'd know it's a worthy attributation of priceless evidence that this book - whatever the haters in their ivory towers wanking off to T.S. Eliot's most obscure & esoteric academica might say - has DONE something good, and that is infinitely better than everything said by the critics**** who would be the arbiters of Is [x] Thing Good.

   This is my blog and I will arbite here: this is a very good book and would make a strong heartfelt present to anyone (even if they don't generally give a hoot about poems) who is going through a rough patch after surviving abuse or having a bad breakup. Kaur's poems will sit with readers through their grief and may genuinely help disentangle webs of self-doubt, fear or other negative emotions, and they won't even have to keep cross-checking Sparknotes to ensure they're following their feels-journeys properly.

* Don't @ me, it's a big fucking market

** I say most because there are quite a few that I properly enjoyed too, for their creative content and not just pathos-bombing.

*** And for many people rightly so, because maybe for they the sole initial means of encountering poetry has been through rigorous pointless academic study and never for enjoyment or personal growth or exploration. Do you think some of the people who read milk & honey who had never read a poetry book before went on to read more poetry and found that in fact they found poets who they decided were better than Rupi Kaur? Maybe! Does this make Kaur less of a fantastic poet for having created a book which both helps people & induces them onwards into the world of words?

**** Yes, I am fully aware that I do write a whole blog effectively critiquing every book I read - but I approach the entire endeavour rather laxly, and always try to consider context & intended audience & such with stuff, and don't usually rate the books rather preferring to recommend who might enjoy it and for what - so I'm not really a critic, more a sort of pan-biblioliterary speculative cartographer.