Skip to content

Milk and Honey

Pages
208
Published
2017
Language
English

Synopsis

A collection of poetry and prose about survival, "milk and honey" moves through four chapters — the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing — each dedicated to a different flavor of pain and the sweetness that can be salvaged from it.

Rupi Kaur writes in spare, lowercase free verse, accompanied by her own simple line drawings, about violence, abuse, love, loss, trauma, and femininity. The short, direct pieces trace a movement from wounding toward tenderness and self-repair, treating the most bitter experiences as something that can, with time, be transformed.

A word-of-mouth phenomenon that helped define a generation of contemporary Instagram-era poetry, the collection speaks plainly to readers navigating heartbreak, healing, and what it means to reclaim yourself.

Vibe

About the author

R
Rupi Kaur

Rupi Kaur is a Canadian poet, illustrator, photographer and author, born on 4 October 1992 in Punjab, India. Her family emigrated to Canada when she was three and settled in Brampton, Ontario. She studied rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo and began sharing her poems and line drawings on Instagram in 2013. She self-published her debut collection, milk and honey, in 2014, and it was later picked up by Andrews McMeel Publishing. Her other collections are the sun and he...

Characters

All characters in Milk and Honey

Frequently asked questions

  • Is this book part of a series?

    This collection is often grouped with the author's subsequent works, The Sun and Her Flowers and Home Body, as a trilogy that explores evolving stages of personal experience.

  • What is the significance of the four chapters in the book?

    The structure is intentionally divided into four distinct stages—the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing—to mirror a chronological journey through personal trauma and eventual recovery.

Read all 14 reviews