Milk and Honey

by Rupi Kaur

[inlibrisveritas]

Milk and Honey is a book of poems about love, abuse, and womanhood. I’m not someone who reads a lot of poetry because it’s one of those intensely personal readings that don’t always hit people the same way. It’s emotion poured onto a page and it’s hard to say how anyone person will respond. It’s not that I avoid that uncertainty, it’s simply that I don’t actively seek it and I plan to change that this year.

All of the poems deal with some form of love or pain and it doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects. I really liked the rawness of Kaur’s poetry but the oddness of the free verse kind of detracted from the book as a whole. I don’t really mind odd spacing in poems, a lot of the time it has a purpose in some way, but it just didn’t hit me with some of these as being impactful. There was a lot a lot of repeat in some of the shorter poems that probably could have been combined on one page in some way…and in some cases, it wasn’t really poetry so much as a single sentence. I will say if you go into this expecting poetry in its more obvious forms, this isn’t for you. It’s an oddly disjointed affair at times, and while the passages are impactful it can be odd trying to figure out how to read it to get the impact it was meant to have. I found that in some cases it only worked well if read aloud.

It’s hard to really review something so based on personal experience and opinions, but I really did like it even though some of the poems just didn’t work for me or were underwhelming. I did love her body positive messages and her poems about speaking up, and the art was a nice touch in areas. It was a quick and mostly enjoyable read, but I’m sort of happy I didn’t purchase it like I had planned to.