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Home Body, styled by its author in lowercase as home body, is the third poetry collection by Rupi Kaur, the Punjabi Canadian poet, illustrator and performer, published on 17 November 2020 by Andrews McMeel Publishing in the United States and Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom. Its poems and her own line drawings are arranged in four chapters named mind, heart, rest and awake, and the book is built as a set of honest conversations with herself: a journey through the past and the present towards what she calls a home inside the self. Kaur described it before publication as a love letter to the self, a reminder to fill up on love, acceptance and community, because nobody gets anywhere alone. It debuted at number one on bestseller lists across the world, as her two earlier collections had done.

About the book

The book arrived at a strange moment. It was published in November 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many of its readers were at home with their own thoughts in a way they had not been before, and its subjects of anxiety, exhaustion and learning to rest spoke directly to that year. By then Kaur's first two collections, Milk and Honey (2014) and The Sun and Her Flowers (2017), had together sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages, figures her publisher gave when this book was announced. The first edition runs to 188 pages in the Andrews McMeel edition. The poems keep the form readers know: short pieces, often only a few lines, in lowercase letters with the full stop as the only punctuation, a choice she has linked to the Gurmukhi script, whose letters sit on one level with no capitals, and about every second poem carries one of her drawings.

What are the four chapters of Home Body?

The four chapters are mind, heart, rest and awake, and together they trace a movement from pain towards a steadier self. Mind opens the book with depression, anxiety and negative thoughts, and with the after-effects of abuse: a Sikh reviewer at Kaur Life, Simi Kaur, noted that Kaur speaks about subjects her own community often treats as closed, and argues that the conversation has only begun. Heart turns to relationships, family and worth, including the difficulty of telling an unhealthy relationship from a healthy one. Rest is the book's most quoted turn: it questions work, success and what Kaur calls productivity guilt, the habit of measuring your worth by how much you have done, and argues that rest is a need and not a reward. Awake closes the collection with finding a voice and using it: it takes in misogyny and prejudice, and includes the poem she titles never forget 1984, remembering the Sikhs killed in India in 1984, which the Kaur Life review singled out as the poem that struck its Punjabi diaspora reviewer hardest.

Themes and style

Her publisher lists the book's ground plainly: family and home, mental health and depression, femininity and masculinity, and love and acceptance, continuing the themes of her earlier work, love, loss, trauma, healing, femininity and migration, and adding acceptance of the self. What is new here is the direction of the journey. The first book moved through hurt towards healing at the hands of others as much as herself; this one is deliberately inward, an argument that everything the speaker needs already exists in her, in the words of the short poem titled home that her publisher uses to introduce the book. A review in Tint Journal read it the same way, as an homage to emotional growth that is personal and collective at once, moving from heaviness towards self-acceptance and care for community and planet. The plainness of the language remains the dividing line in how she is read, and this Kosh takes no side in that argument: what is not in doubt is the scale of the readership the style has found.

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 studied rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo, wrote, illustrated and self-published Milk and Honey as a student, and became the best known of the poets who built their first audience on social media. Poetry came to her early through the Sikh tradition of her family, whose scriptures are written in verse, and she performed classical music on stage for years as a child before she performed poems. Home Body is the third panel of the sequence her first three books form, and her own page in this Kosh tells her fuller story. This Kosh also holds Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers.

Reception and legacy

The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list for fiction paperbacks, and her publisher describes it, like its two predecessors, as a number one New York Times bestseller that debuted at number one on bestseller lists across the world. Her publisher's current count gives her collections together more than 11 million copies sold in more than 43 languages. A hardcover edition with exclusive new poems followed from Simon & Schuster in December 2021, and she went on to a fourth book, Healing Through Words, in 2022. Within her own sequence, Home Body is the book in which the recovery her readers had followed across two collections is tested by adult working life and a locked-down world, and the answer she offers is rest and community rather than one more push. For Punjabi readers it is also her most openly diasporic book so far, the one where the mind chapter's silence-breaking and the awake chapter's memory of 1984 sit inside a bestseller read on every continent.

What should I read next?

Readers usually read this book as the third part of a sequence, after Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers, both in this Kosh: hurting, loving, breaking and healing in the first, wilting to blooming in the second, and mind, heart, rest and awake in this one. Kaur's Healing Through Words (2022) continues from here as a book of guided writing exercises rather than a poetry collection.