The Sun and Her Flowers – Book review – 3⭐️

The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur.
(Published October 2017).

Last year I read Milk and Honey and rated it 3.5 stars.
I figured I’d give Rupi Kaur’s second poetry collection The Sun and Her Flowers a go to see if my opinion would be different, but most of these poems seemed even more bland and basic than the ones in her first book.

I appreciate Kaur’s openness and honesty about the (often) heartbreaking and traumatic things she’s been through and I applaud her strength and her willingness to inspire others, but it’s as if she’s trying too hard with these poems. A few of them are great, but most of the others seem like filler. They’re too cliché, too “teenagey” sappy, too simple, too empty.
Like these:

“i could be anything
in the world
but i wanted to be his”

“you took the sun with you
when you left”

“like the rainbow
after the rain
joy will reveal itself
after sorrow”

And the same things that bothered me while reading Milk and Honey bothered me this time, like the lack of punctuation and capital letters and the seemingly very random line breaks.

because
it still seems strange to me
to simply write something
in this way
and call it
a poem

However, there are some bits that I did like, such as:

“i live for that first second in the morning
when i am still half-conscious
i hear the hummingbirds outside
flirting with the flowers
i hear the flowers giggling
and the bees grow jealous”

“it takes a broken person to come searching
for meaning between my legs
it takes a complete. whole. perfectly designed
person to survive it
it takes monsters to steal souls
and fighters to reclaim them”

“how can i refuse to believe
my life is anything short of a miracle
if amidst all this chaos
i was given this life”

I have read beautiful writing. Books and chapters and sentences that resonated with me, sparked my imagination, inspired me, stuck with me for years and years, but that sadly doesn’t include Kaur’s writing (except for the odd sentence here and there).
The Sun and Her Flowers has its good parts, but most of it simply didn’t stand out to me in any way, so it pales in comparison to other books I’ve read.

3 out of 5 stars.

This review can also be found on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2694011070