Healing Through Words

Healing Through Words is the fourth book by Rupi Kaur, the Punjabi Canadian poet, illustrator and performer, published on 27 September 2022 by Andrews McMeel Publishing in the United States and Simon & Schuster. It is not a poetry collection. It is a guided writing book: a hardcover of 320 pages holding more than sixty writing exercises of Kaur's own design, arranged in the four chapters of her first book, hurting, loving, breaking and healing, with excerpts of poetry and illustrations from her earlier collections woven through it. Where her first three books gave readers her words, this one asks readers to write their own, and Kaur has called it a bookend, guarding over the trilogy that came before it.

About the book

Kaur describes the book as a guided tour on the journey back to the self, a cathartic and mindful exploration through writing. Her publisher states its terms plainly: the collection asks only that you be vulnerable and honest, both with yourself and the page, and you do not need to be a writer to take the walk, you just need to write. Alongside the exercises, Kaur shares her own writing tips, tricks and secrets, the craft behind the plain style that made her famous. The exercises ask you to reflect on a piece of poetry, or examine a drawing, or answer a question, and each prompt is meant to connect you with yourself. The book is designed to be written in, with guidelines and instructions that still leave room for the reader's own interpretation, and to be returned to: its final chapter can be revisited over and over.

What are the four chapters of Healing Through Words?

The four chapters are hurting, loving, breaking and healing, the same four movements as Milk and Honey (2014), and the publisher counts more than 65 freewriting exercises across them in its edition notes. Hurting comes first: it explores trauma, with exercises designed to consider your experiences and confront pain within the safety of your writing, giving voice to the hard experiences that often sit in silence. Loving examines love in its many facets, from longing and friendship to first loves and marriage, helping the reader define what love means to them. Breaking takes in heartbreak in every part of life, a falling out with a friend, a relationship ending, or a dream that does not work out, and its exercises help you move through those experiences and reclaim your story. Healing closes the book: it is about recognising the value in yourself, reflecting on why you are worthy of joy and how you are brave, and treating healing as a lifelong process rather than a finish line.

How did Healing Through Words begin?

Kaur has told the story herself, at a press conference for student journalists in August 2022, a month before publication. The book began as a private tool: she built the exercises to break her own writer's block, working from her own poems and from writers she loved, after she could not find existing tools that went deep enough. During the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic she shared the exercises on Instagram Live, and found that so many of her readers were also writers. She has said it was the first book she did not feel pressure or obligation to make a bestseller: it started as something she made for herself, and she decided to publish it as a gift once she realised it could help her readers too. Her own line, quoted by her publisher at the announcement, is the book's seed: writing has been a cathartic experience that helped me heal, and the exercises are meant to send readers on a journey of self-exploration.

The author

Rupi Kaur was born on 4 October 1992 in Punjab, India, into a Sikh family, came to Canada as a small child and was raised in Brampton, Ontario. She wrote, illustrated and self-published Milk and Honey as a student at the University of Waterloo, and her publisher's current biography gives her first three collections together more than twelve million copies sold in more than forty languages. Home Body (2020), the third of them, is in this Kosh alongside Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers, and her own page in this Kosh tells her fuller story. Healing Through Words is the book where the performer steps back: after three collections and a world of stages, she hands the pen to the audience.

A different kind of fourth book

Fourth books usually extend a series. This one closes one. Kaur calls her first three books a trilogy, and describes Healing Through Words as a bookend guarding over them: she has given readers three books of her own words, and this one asks them to write what comes next, because they have the power to. That is also why the book has had a different public life from the collections: it is used as a journal and a self-care practice, worked through slowly rather than read in a sitting, and Kaur has said she hopes people add it to their self-care practice, whether they use it professionally or for personal enjoyment. For the Kosh, its place is as the hinge in her bibliography: everything before it is poetry she published, and it is the clearest statement she has made of how that poetry gets written, exercise by exercise.

What should I read next?

Read the trilogy this book guards, all in this Kosh: Milk and Honey for the original four chapters of hurting, loving, breaking and healing, The Sun and Her Flowers for the sequence of wilting to blooming, and Home Body for mind, heart, rest and awake. Readers who finish the exercises and want more of the method can look for the writing prompt card decks Kaur later built from the same idea.