Rupi Kaur Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Rupi Kaur is an Indian born Canadian performer and poet. Her poems have pioneered a new genre of easily accessible and short genre of poetry distributed and popularized through social media and known as Instapoetry. She has become a very popular poet, particularly among the masses ever since she published her first work in 2014 “Milk and Honey.” The novel went on to outsell “The Odyssey” and become the bestselling poetry work of all time. The work sold more than 2.5 million copies and spent more than 77 weeks on the New York Times bestselling list. Kaur has also been subject to widespread media fame and scholarly attention for the illustrations in her poetry and the use of menstrual blood to create variety in her visual poetry.

Rupi Kaur was born in Punjab India to a Sikh family that immigrated to Canada when the poet was four years old. As such, Kaur draws a lot of her inspiration from her Indian heritage and her Sikh religion. She also asserts that her mother taught her how to paint and draw, a skill that she has put to use illustrating her poems. She went to the Turner Fenton Secondary School for her high school studies, before she proceeded to the University of Waterloo, where she studied professional writing and rhetoric. However, she did not always want to be a poet growing up as she loved the idea of becoming a visual artist more. She started dabbling in the arts as a girl when her mother guided her drawing even as her childhood poetry remained something of a hobby. She would write a few lines of poetry in birthday cards from family and friends and thought she would outgrow it and soon focus on what she really wanted to do – paint and draw. But she was exposed to poets like Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin as a 20-year-old in 2013 and everything changed. She was inspired by these great poets and began writing poetry and posting it on her social media accounts.

Similar to many of her contemporaries, Kaur first got her name out there through social media. She would post her poetry on her Twitter account which currently has more than 100,000 followers and her Instagram with nearly a million followers. The Instapoet spend years building her community and presence online by engaging with fans about the issues and themes in her poetry. While the term internet celebrity is still foreign to many people, it borrows a lot from the old school notions of what a celebrity is. People love to be exposed to interesting art, connect, be entertained, and interact with entertainers and artists on a personal level. Kaur has shown that she can be a master of doing all those things in an honest and natural way. While she never planned to publish, in 2014 her fans started asking where they could get copies of her works. She had been putting it all online and did not have a compilation as she did not think there would be demand for something like a printed poetry book. She self-published the work on Amazon in 2014, where it immediately shot up the charts selling thousands of copies within a few weeks.

Rupi has gained a lot of popularity for her profound work. She writes in the Gumurkhi script to honor her Punjabi language and culture. Her poetry is known for using a period as the only punctuation and not having any uppercase letters. She writes on several themes though her main themes include representation, strength, and femininity. Many of Kaur’s poems are about her mother, particularly the strength she drew from her as she grew up. She writes about how her mother taught her sacrifice and love, her strength and how she provided for the family. Empowerment is another common theme in her novels particularly the empowerment of women. She typically divides her works into chapters each with its own themes such as the breaking, the loving, blooming, rooting and wilting among others. Her first work “Milk and Honey” is mostly about empowerment while the second novel is more focused on themes of relearning and regrowth. One of the most standout aspects of her work are the illustrations which she does herself. Using simple lines and no colors she adds understanding and depth to her poetry and asserts that photography and illustration are part of her expression, which she uses for creative interpretation.

Kaur’s first work “Milk and Honey” slays emotion and invokes feminist feeling with its bold writing that touches the ultra-sensitive soul. She will draw out the feelings of any reader with this gorgeous collection of poetry. She writes about femininity, love, trauma, and loss, which are subjects that affect many in her audience. Using thorough though spare language, she writes about what it feels like to be loved, to be broken and yet be strong in one’s unique way. It is a simple collection that talks about some of the most hopeful yet dark aspects of the human heart that most of us have. Reading the collection is akin to marinating in your emotions while pondering a range of topical issues such as what it means to love, getting over heartbreak and female empowerment. At its core, the work is about sadness and love, despair and happiness, joy and hurt, and finding the strength to overcome the many challenges in life. It is at times harrowing, erotic, empowering, poignant celebration of what it means to be a woman. The work is divided into four chapters each with its own theme that are the healing, the breaking, the hurting and the loving.

“The Sun and Her Flowers” is Rupi Kaur’s second collection that comes with as much emotion as her first work. It is a transcendent and vibrant work of the journey of healing and growth divided into five chapters. It also tells of honoring one’s roots, expatriation, and ancestry. Kaur writes in her brave and audacious voice nailing to perfection intimate details that make her work so effervescent. Her poetry explores issues of sexual assault, self-love, insecurity, self-hate, feminism, body image, feminism, motherly love and girls supporting girls among many others. Just like with her first novel it is a work of blooming poetry as she tells of growth and healing in different aspects of life. Told in the format of stages of growth, the work tackles the root of suffering and emotion and asks that we accept the people around us, learn to have self-love and accept out immigrant patents and heritage. The message is that you are important and you do come first, which can be very empowering. As usual, her poetry is full of passion, easy to grasp, simple and direct. They come with raw emotion and thought in the written lines and illustrations that help paint vivid emotions and pictures inside you.