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A review by intonewrealms
Home Body by Rupi Kaur
dark
reflective
fast-paced
1.5
This poetry collection covers some very raw, painful experiences and if you’re going to check it out I would definitely be aware of that.
The book is split into four sections: Mind; Heart; Rest; Awake. I would say that Mind is far and away the best as it contains the most amount of poems which I feel actually manage to explore Kaur’s trauma or ruminate on her experiences whereas I feel a lot of this stuff is pretty classic ‘Instagram poetry’. A lot of it is also just very nothingy for example whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the statement ‘I am not interested in a feminism/ that excludes trans women’ to me that is not poetry, it is just a statement. In the longer poems my biggest issues is the punctuation: full stops in the middle of a sentence; line breaks without a purpose. If you are going to play with punctuation for a reason I understand that but this just felt like she was trying to be ✨different✨ because if you read this poetry aloud the way that she has written it down it sounds ridiculous! I also don’t understand why sometimes she does this thing of putting a hyphen and then the last line of the poem as if it’s the title. One thing I will say I liked was her ocasional word play, such as Sikh and sick, and the alliterative sound of the phrase ‘soles swollen’ for example, but I wish she had done things like this an awful lot more.
The book is split into four sections: Mind; Heart; Rest; Awake. I would say that Mind is far and away the best as it contains the most amount of poems which I feel actually manage to explore Kaur’s trauma or ruminate on her experiences whereas I feel a lot of this stuff is pretty classic ‘Instagram poetry’. A lot of it is also just very nothingy for example whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the statement ‘I am not interested in a feminism/ that excludes trans women’ to me that is not poetry, it is just a statement. In the longer poems my biggest issues is the punctuation: full stops in the middle of a sentence; line breaks without a purpose. If you are going to play with punctuation for a reason I understand that but this just felt like she was trying to be ✨different✨ because if you read this poetry aloud the way that she has written it down it sounds ridiculous! I also don’t understand why sometimes she does this thing of putting a hyphen and then the last line of the poem as if it’s the title. One thing I will say I liked was her ocasional word play, such as Sikh and sick, and the alliterative sound of the phrase ‘soles swollen’ for example, but I wish she had done things like this an awful lot more.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse and Rape
Moderate: Racism and Sexism