milk and honey is the debut poetry collection by Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. Most of the poems are short, and many of them are accompanied by one of Kaur’s ink drawings. Kaur doesn’t use capitalization in her poems, and she uses punctuation sparingly, usually relying on line breaks rather than commas or periods to indicate a pause. The book is divided into four sections or chapters: “The Hurting,” “The Loving,” “The Breaking,” and “The Healing,” each narrated by a female speaker who is healing from a history of sexual abuse as well as from her first major heartbreak. The first section, “The Hurting,” focuses on the abuse the speaker experienced during her childhood. “The Loving” recounts her first significant romantic relationship as an adult. “The Breaking” describes the aftermath of that relationship and is the longest section in the book. In “The Healing,” the speaker is able to heal and find empowerment through her personal journey, her writing, and her community. Kaur plays with structure in several places in milk and honey, sometimes placing her text around or inside a drawing, and diverting from her poems’ usual structure by including a prose poem and a poem in the form of a list.
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