Milk and Honey: Summary and Review
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
Review
Rupi shares personal stories about abuse, sexuality, relationships, and self-love through poetry and illustrations.
This book was highly shared in our idea club. See below for my notes from the discussion.
Summary
The book is divided in to four sections, some selected passages from each to give you a sense of their theme:
the hurting
you were so afraid
of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too
the loving
he placed his hands
on my mind
before reaching
for my waist
my hips
or my lips
he didn’t call me
beautiful first
he called me
exquisite
he asks me what i do
i tell him i work for a small company
that makes packaging for—
he stops me midsentence
no not what you do to pay the bills
what drives you crazy
what keeps you up at night
i tell him i write
the breaking
you were so distant
i forgot you were there at all
the healing
if you are not enough for yourself
you will never be enough
for someone else
Discussion
Some topics that came up during the discussion:
- Is this book “good”? This Goodreads Reviewer captures the essential criticism.
- Comedy: “Jokes are about shortcuts”. What are comedians allowed/not allowed to say?
- What is “art”? Art as a declaration of status. We say something is “art” when we mean it deserves high status and we say something is “not art” when we mean it deserves low status.
- Coursera Poetry Workshop: Taking a paragraph and adding spaces and line breaks is technically considered “poetry”
- When He Leaves You by Michaela Angemeer
- “Drawing with words”. This type of poetry does not rhyme, but you can think of the words themselves as drawing a picture based on their position.