Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

+ Angharad's thoughts +

This book is a collection of poetry split into four parts: hurting, loving, breaking and healing. It is combined with beautiful illustrations that I just want tattooed all over my body. I must admit I'm not usually a huge fan of poetry. For me to like it, I need to connect with it and I connected to this book from its first poem. It hurt my heart in ways I didn't know a heart could hurt. I experienced everything with the author, every emotion, every revelation, every hurt. I hurt, I loved, I broke and I healed alongside her. Things got close to home but in a beautiful way. Rupi Kaur reminds us to love ourselves and love one another, to accept our femininity, to be okay with our broken parts. She encourages women to love one another but most importantly, for us to love ourselves. As she says 'you are your own soulmate.' A line so simple and yet something that we so often forget to remember. 

This book is important to me, I want to clutch it to my heart and thank it. It is honest and raw. It is eye-opening and it is addictive. I think every person, especially every woman should read this book. Rupi Kaur doesn't shy away from all the parts that make a woman. The miracles our bodies can perform, the pain that we can withstand. All the horribly beautiful things that make us. I'm happy a book of poetry like this exists, written by a woman who has known pain but has also known healing. 

we are all born so beautiful
the greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not.

+ Becky's thoughts +

I've been a fan of Rupi Kaur's work for a while now, after seeing many of her poems on Instagram and always being to relate to them in some way. I'm so glad that I finally decided to pick up Milk and Honey so I could read more of her work - although I can appreciate some poetry every now and then, I'm not the biggest fan of it and I've never read a poetry book until now. Despite that, I'm confident that this was the best possible book of poetry I could have read. I jumped straight into this book and read it in one sitting, and then went back and read the entire thing again. These poems made me feel so many things, and many of them felt like they'd been plucked right from my own thoughts.

Milk and Honey's overall theme is one of relationships; from how they begin to how they end, and all of the hurt and healing that happens in between and during those two defining moments. It focuses on mental health, feminism, and emotional and physical pain. It looks at relationships within families as well as with spouses, and how the ruination of one could affect the other throughout someone's life. 

“If you were born with the weakness to fall you were born with the strength to rise.” 

Have you read this book? If so, what were your thoughts?

Love,