Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

This poetry collection has been on my radar for a while. It completely blew up on BookTube and the internet last year after becoming a New York Times Bestseller, and it’s taken me until now to get a copy and read it (to be fair, its not been sat on my shelf for years, i got it a month ago).

Title: Milk and Honey

Author: Rupi Kaur

Genre: Adult, Poetry, Feminism

Publication Date: November 5th 2015

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Pages: 205

Summary: 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.

I’m not a huge poetry reader, i’m actually quite fussy with my poetry. I need a book of poems to tell me a story in whole, i need them to be fast, so fast that i need to think about what i read afterwards. This one blew me away. Kaur’s writing style is up there with the best poets i’ve ever read, i cannot fathom how she manages to write in such an impactful and powerful way. Some of the pages in this book simply stunned me.

I also saw a lot of myself in these pages. Some of the single poems i found i could identify with very well, and that’s something i’ve grown to love finding in books. My pages are full of sticky notes, marking the poems that i adored and the ones i found to relate to myself the best. It’s wonderful to find snippets of life that someone else has written that you can associate with yourself.

Milk and Honey i’m sure you’re all aware deals with some big topics. Feminism, abuse, love, heartbreak and healing are just some of the topics covered. The book is split in to four sections, first ‘the hurting’, second ‘the loving’, third ‘the breaking’ and lastly ‘the healing’. Whereas i loved each section in their own ways, ‘the healing’ was a section that i truly loved. It was filled with powerful statements that empowered women and everyone around us. It’s rare to find such empowering literature. These words can be converted in to every aspect of life. One of my favourites in the book is:

you were a dragon long before he came around and said you could fly

you will remain a dragon long after he’s left

This is just one example of the kind of inspirational messages that this collection covers. Milk and Honey takes you on a journey through life in very few pages, i adore books like that as a lot of people do.

As someone who is a bit of poetry novice, and i’m aware that this book has also had some bad reviews alongside the incredible ones, i advise you to start here with poetry. Each and every woman (and probably a lot of men) will find something of comfort in these pages, something that makes them think. And i think that’s the perfect way to go in to a collection of poetry, expecting to think.