Milk and Honey – Book review

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur.
(Published November 2014).

This is a bit of a hard one for me to rate, because though I did enjoy reading it, I didn’t find it that memorable or brilliant.

Most of the poems had a quite basic feel to it. They didn’t stand out to me. They didn’t make me feel like I had just read something beautiful or deep, something that would stick with me after I would put the book away. It was merely… an okay read.

i also wonder if the poetry
in milk and honey
is truly poetry
because I feel like
if i write
my review
in this way
i could also claim
that it is a poem
but is that
really
the case though

I’m going to be honest with you and admit that I know too little about poetry to be able to say whether the poems in this book are actual poems. I hate to base my opinions on ignorance, so take my doubts about this with a grain of salt.
The feeling I get when reading this though, is that this book is not filled with genuine poems, because they just seem too simple and too basic. However, if a true connoisseur claims it is actual poetry, I’m sure they’re right and I will stand corrected.

Milk and Honey is also packed with a pet peeve of mine, which is the lack of use of punctuation and capital letters. It hurts my soul to see ‘I’ written as ‘i’. I almost can’t bear it. (Imagine the excruciating pain I went through when writing that mock poem above).
When researching this book and the writer, I read somewhere that the absence of punctuation and capital letters is because Rupi Kaur wanted the language to resemble Punjabi. In that case, I fully understand and even think it’s a nice touch (even though part of me dies every time I see a lower case ‘i’).

I will end this review on a positive note by saying that there were a few poems I did genuinely like, because of its beauty and/or its message, such as:

“the very thought of you
has my legs spread apart
like an easel with a canvas
begging for art”

“i’d be lying if i said
you make me speechless
the truth is you make my
tongue so weak it forgets
what language to speak in”

“rivers fall from my mouth
tears my eyes can’t carry”

“your art
is not about how many people
like your work
your art
is about
if your heart likes your work
if your soul likes your work
it’s about how honest
you are with yourself
and you
must never
trade honesty
for relatability”

All in all I can’t give this more than 3.5 out of 5 stars.

This review can also be found on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2478135231