Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur is a book of poetry that is separated into four different sections: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing. Pain and heartache is a common theme in this collection, but it also deals with love, abuse, loss, feminism, violence, and survival. It is all about finding the hidden sweetness in the most bitter moments life has to offer.

This book was extremely hard for me to rate. I am not an avid poetry reader, but I have always wanted to be. I picked up this book because I had heard so much about it. The description gave me that idea that it was going to tell a story, but that is not what happened in this book.

Each poem stood on its own. While it sometimes felt like several of them were connected, there were times that I was extremely confused because I was trying to connect them. It was not an easy read and it did not have the impact I was expecting. I felt like half the book was out of order. It went from talking about being abused to being born.

There was no structure or format throughout this book. Punctuation was either over or underused. Some poems did not have a single punctuation mark, while others had one after every other word. Some of the poems were difficult to follow. Some of the poems were just blocks of writing that didn’t seem to have a point.

Then there were the drawings. While a few of the drawings did seem to enhance the poetry, I felt like most of them were just distractions and were placed there to fill up all the empty space on the pages, which there was a lot of.

HOWEVER.

Some of the poems ripped out my heart. Some of them made me think about my own situation. Some of them really got to me.

I do not really know what Kaur’s intention was with this book, but it made me think. It made me look at my life and my emotions. It made me take a step back and ask questions.

Overall, I gave this book 2.5 out of 5 stars, but as you know I do not actually use half stars. So I decided to give it 2 out of 5 stars. I really struggled with that decision though. If you are looking for a book of structured poetry, I do not recommend this book. If you are looking for what seemed like someone’s diary, then you might enjoy this book.

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