2.5/5 
 Ok. So, I'm not the greatest patron of poetry, but "Milk and Honey" was just easy to breeze through. This is the second indian poet whose work I've come across this month; watch Aranya Johar's impressive slam poetry entry at Tuning Fork, called "A Brown Girl's Guide to Gender" and tell me if it doesn't leave you with goosebumps when she calls bullshit on the rape culture in India. 
 Rupi Kaur has a very unassuming writing style that is refreshingly simple and concise without being too simplistic. I expected a collection of random poems, but that's not the case here; it's split into four chapters: (1) the hurting (2) the loving 
 (3) the breaking (4) the healing ... and tells a story with beginning and end, about the different relationships in life with autobiographical parts interwoven in it, littered with Kaur's doodles. The relationships are those between parent-child, relatives, lovers and the one you have with yourself; sometimes healthy, other times abusive and destructive and how they shape you into the person you are. But in the end it's actually a journey of empowerment and acceptance. 
 I've noticed poets writing poems with their words carefully placed on the page, lots of gaps and negative space, you see? I don't know if I'm just blind to the nuances of poetry, but if you write something like this: 
 It automatically gets converted to this in my head: 
 That being said, after reading Rupi Kaur's biography & FAQ on her website, I was better able to appreciate her work; for instance she eloquently explains why it's important for her to use lowercase and almost no other special characters in her writing: 
 although i can read and understand my mother tongue (punjabi) i do not have the skillset to write poetry in it. to write punjabi means to use gurmukhi script. and within this script there are no uppercase or lowercase letters. all letters are treated the same. i enjoy how simple that is. how symmetrical and how absolutely straightforward. i also feel there is a level of equality this visuality brings to the work. a visual representation of what i want to see more of within the world: equalness. 
 and the only punctuation that exists within gurmukhi script is a period. which is represented through the following symbol: | 
 so in order to preserve these small details of my mother language I include them within this language. no case distinction and only periods. a world within a world. which is what i am as an immigrant. as a diasporic punjabi sikh woman. it is less about breaking the rules of english (although that's pretty fun) but more about tying in my own history and heritage within my work. / source 
 kaur is great, when she uses anecdotes: 
 when my mother was pregnant 
 with her second child i was four 
 i pointed at her swollen belly confused at how 
 my mother had gotten so big in such a little time 
 my father scooped me in his tree trunk arms and 
 said the closest thing to god on this earth 
 is a woman's body it's where life comes from 
 and to have a grown man tell me something 
 so powerful at such a young age 
 changed me to see the entire universe 
 rested at my mother's feet 
 Parts of it felt contrived and cliched, but there were some shorter pieces amongst them too that stood out to me: 
 i've had sex she said 
 but i don't know 
 what making love 
 feels like