As I read, I kept having this recurring thought that my younger self would have really gotten a lot out of this book. The word I would use to describe this book isn’t “bad” but “familiar.” Reading Milk and Honey is like reading the journal entries and Tumblr text posts of my teenage self, my first forays into relationships and their traumas, my first clumsy swipes at The Patriarchy, the humble (but so, so tinged with hubris) beginnings of forming my own identity. There are even at least a couple of lines that I found inventive, or at the very least personally poignant (“i know i / should crumble / for better reasons”). And I’ll start by throwing Rupi Kaur and her fans a really hollow sort of bone: Milk and Honey is not a Bad Book. I don’t like feeling like a pretentious asshole, so this week, I finally got my hands on a copy of Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey and read the whole thing – every vague illustration and even-more-vague one-liner of it.

Martha’s mom thought Milk and Honey was a good book, and I was a guest in her house sitting at her kitchen table explaining why a book I admittedly hadn’t even read cover-to-cover was Bad and An Affront to Poetry, like some kind of pretentious asshole. I tried to defend myself – it’s just not my taste / I’ve only ever read excerpts of her book while paging through it in the ridiculously sparse poetry section at the Barnes & Noble / I just don’t like the tone it sets for Poetry At Large – but ultimately all I did was shove a dozen more feet into my mouth. I could almost see Martha’s mother’s heart sink when I begrudgingly confirmed that it was true: I was not fond of Rupi Kaur. Martha revealed in not so many words that I do not particularly like Kaur or think especially highly of her and her contemporaries’ work. We eventually arrived at the topic of poetry, at which point Martha’s mother brought up Rupi Kaur and how much she’d liked her book, Milk and Honey.

About a year ago, my friend Martha was in town for a weekend and invited me over to have dinner with her and her mother.

Poetry books like milk and honey