rupi kaur: worth the hype?

Saesha Kukreja
4 min readJan 18, 2024

Rupi Kaur. You either hate her or love her. And even as I type that out, I’m not entirely sure if I know of a single person who loves her, but she sure has a fan base because she is immensely successful. Not only is she a #1 New York Times bestselling author, but her debut ‘milk and honey’ surpassed Homer’s Odyssey as the best-selling poetry of all time.

Image by Failure Before Success from the Article ‘Rupi Kaur | Success story of the Indian-Canadian poet’

Recently, she’s been under fire as her critically acclaimed poetry book milk and honey has been banned from schools across America. But this isn’t the first time that her name has been the topic of conversation. She regularly makes rounds on Instagram and YouTube for her controversial and perhaps lackadaisical poems.

I personally have always commended Kaur for being a trailblazer in the field of literature for South Asian women because we don’t have a lot of representation in the industry. I must admit that I felt a sense of pride over the fact that she is a first-generation Indo-Canadian immigrant like myself, and for that reason alone, I had a level of respect and admiration for her without ever having read her work.

But I decided that if I was going to be a full-out Rupi Kaur stan (or critic), I had to delve deep into her most talked about book — milk and honey.

--

--

Saesha Kukreja

Biology Major 🔬/ Author of Quaranteen 🖋/ Avid Reader and Bibliophile 📚