Can't wait to see what 2020 brings for the Insta poet ✨
On a late-April evening, in the atrium of a downtown Toronto library, Rupi Kaur stood barefoot on a stage. She wore a black crop top, high-waisted ivory pants and a long ivory jacket; her nude heels had been kicked to the side. She adjusted the mic and called out a page number from her book, Milk and Honey, then began reading in a low voice.
That was in November 2014, when she was 22 and studying rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo. A year later, after Kaur’s work gained momentum from social media, multiple campus tours and one Instagram controversy, Milk and Honey was snapped up by American publisher Andrews McMeel. Today, the collection, packed with deeply personal poems that sweep from heartache and trauma to recovery and resilience, has more than a million copies in print.
But more than any of her peers, Kaur taps into a zeitgeist that’s big on self-care, and transforming experiences of pain and longing into anthems of acceptance and triumph. Her brief, straightforward lines don’t require much unpacking, and the ones that receive the most likes are usually the unambiguous affirmations: “how you love yourself is / how you teach others / to love you,” or “we are all born / so beautiful / the greatest tragedy is / being convinced we are not.
Those silent years gave way to more tumultuous ones in her teens, with Kaur and her father in near-constant battle. “With immigrant parents, they’ve had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they’re trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries,” she says. There were arguments over cutting her hair, wearing T-shirts to class, going to the movies; Kaur recalls months-long fights to get what she wanted.
Women are often wary of self-promotion—we fear it makes us look too ambitious, too needy, too narcissistic. We preface our accomplishments with apologies for drawing attention to them in the first place. But Kaur is proud of what she’s built. “What I created by myself is right now on the New York Times bestseller list, competing with books that have been released as movies,” she tells me. “I’ve had a lot of success in the past year, and some folks made me feel like it was an accident.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
What Mister Rogers Can Teach Us About Gen X and the Generational DivideGen X was the first generation to fully grow up in a 'Mister Rogers' America, and it’s reasonable to say that they were more impacted by his program than any other. chaneyj writes
Read more »
People underestimating 'angry kids,' says Greta ThunbergPeople are failing to grasp the anger of the younger generation in the face of a...
Read more »
People underestimating 'angry kids' says Greta ThunbergClimate activist GretaThunberg arrives in Lisbon after crossing the Atlantic. She's on her way to Madrid, where the COP25 climate summit is currently underway
Read more »
Your Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Morning RunnerOur complete guide to becoming the efficient, energetic a.m. runner you’ve always dreamed of being—or becoming an even better one.
Read more »