aliciaclarereads's Reviews (1.25k)

Hm, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. This book had so much hype surrounding it, which is pretty amazing for a poetry book written by a woman of color. When milk and honey became more mainstream, I thought it was fantastic that so many people were talking about poetry. But with the hype came the critiques and the parodies... which I cannot pretend I didn't love.

Kaur's style is very simplistic. Her poems are so short and often are just sentences with a few line breaks. There's nothing wrong with short poems, and a few of them did pack a punch. But the majority just didn't. There wasn't much left to dwell on. Especially the final section had a lot of poems that would be better classified as affirmations. That's fine, but it isn't poetry. At least not to me. Also the majority of poems didn't have titles, which was kind of annoying? The few times she named the poems I actually really liked them since it added a little bit of depth. One thing I did like was that there was a clear narrative to the collection.

I'm definitely still interested in reading her next collection, especially to see what about her style and writing as grown or changed.

"stay strong through your pain
grow flowers from it
you have helped me
grow flowers out of mine so
bloom beautifully
dangerously
loudly
bloom softly
however you need
just bloom"
- to the reader