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A review by illiterateliz
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
2.0
"Milk and honey is a collection of poetry about love, loss, trauma, abuse, healing and femininity. It is split into four chapters, each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different heartache. It takes readers through a Journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in everywhere if you are willing to look"
I read this and was beyond excited to say the least. However, when I started reading I was let down more than ever before. Some of the themes are very present in this collection like trauma & abuse but overall the collection didn't seem to stick with the theme it promised. (Of course this is my personal opinion and based on how I understood everything.) Some poems I have to admit I enjoyed greatly and I adored the sketches but as many reviewers have pointed out the pages were too empty and the poems felt a bit like instagram or tumblr quotes
. To add to the above I really cant see how you can write a book about femininity and feminism with a poem like the one of page 88. (amongst others I fail to recall) It says and I quote "the woman who comes after me will be a bootleg version of who I am" It then continues this kind of narrative....I almost stopped reading. How can you include such a hateful view on women in a poem collection which is otherwise aimed at empowering them? I also had a problem with many other poems but another one that bothered me the most was on page 103. "When you are broken and he has left you do not question whether you were enough, the problem was that you were so enough he was not able to carry it." Or maybe, just like another line in the collection "I have been the abused and the abuser ", you were the shitty person that needed to change? There is no such thing and being too good for somebody....There are a few more I could take apart but there is no point analyzing them further. But for a book I was trying to buy for 2 years it was really not worth it
Content Warnings
Moderate: Abandonment, Sexual content, and Mental illness