Rupi Kaur

Rupi Kaur is an author from Canada. She was born in 1992 in Punjab, India but emigrated to Canada when she was only 3 years old. At only 5 years of age, Rupi started painting as her mother did. In her teenage years, the reason for her self-consciousness was her mother who, mostly due to their culture, distanced herself from Kaur, especially when she was menstruating. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she had to witness her family and friends go through sexual and domestic abuse.

The University of Waterloo is where she studied professional and rhetoric writing and taught creative-writing classes.

Kaur’s first book is Milk and Honey. It was self-published in 2014 and she even did the illustrations all by herself.

It’s divided into four chapters: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing. Each of the chapters, as their titles recommend, serve a different purpose.

The book is like an adventure through life, as it shows us the most bitter moments in life and finds some sweetness in them. It tells ‘there’s sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look’.

My favorite poem from the book is:

‘if you are not enough for yourself

you will never be enough

for someone else’

Her second book. called The Sun and Her Flowers was published in 2017. Like the first book, it’s divided into chapters named: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. Rupi herself said that she views it as a ‘one long continuous poem that goes on for 250 pages’. The book has sold even more than a million copies and has been translated into multiple languages.

My favorite poem from the book is:

‘to hate

is an easy thing

but to love

takes strength

everyone has

but not all are

willing to practice’

Her most recent poetry collection is called Home Body and was released in 2020. Its chapters are mind, heart, rest, and awake. In this book, Rupi embraces growth, and she reminds readers to love and be loved.

My favorite poem:

‘it’s easy to love

the nice things about ourselves

but true self-love is

embracing the difficult parts

that live in all of us’

She has also released a fourth book, Healing Through Words, a guided journal where people can do exercises that help them explore themes of trauma, love, etc.

Her work is both criticized and loved by people. Some say she’s doing a good thing by writing her poems and touching themes that might be difficult for some, but others say that she’s doing the wrong thing and ruining people’s minds.

I think Rupi is doing a good thing and I’m glad she’s touching themes that some people are afraid to. It’s good to have an author like her, whom we girls can read and reflect on. I really hope she’ll release more poetry collections in the future and that she’ll always be as wonderful at writing as she is now.