Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey making feminist poetry sexy (and saleable) again

I know I am hopelessly behind the times, as usual, but I have just been listening to Rupi Kaur reading her Milk and Honey poems. 
Ms. Kaur is a young (just 22 at the time of writing this short collection) Canadian woman of Indian background, who self-published her poems and then became an unexpected best-selling phenom. She has just published a second collection The Sun and her Flowers, hoping to build on this momentum.
Ms. Kaur's blank verse is quite visceral, powerful and affirming, even if some of the more aphoristic soundbites are perhaps not quite as deep as the dramatic pauses suggest. It is certainly a worthy addition to the canon of feminist poetry, and literature in general, if that is not damning it with faint praise (not my intention at all). 
And it is probably just the kind of thing that young women everywhere should read or listen to (and guys too, for that matter, in this age of #HimThough, #HowIWillChange, etc, etc).

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