Milk and Honeymilk and honey

About the book

Milk and Honey, styled by its author as milk and honey, is the first book of Rupi Kaur, the Punjabi Canadian poet, artist and performer. Kaur wrote, illustrated and designed it herself while she was a university student, and self-published it in November 2014 after she could not find a publisher. Andrews McMeel Publishing picked it up and republished it in October 2015, and from there it became one of the publishing stories of the decade: a number one New York Times bestseller that, by its publisher's count, has sold more than 6 million copies, described by Andrews McMeel as the highest selling book of poetry of the twenty-first century. A tenth anniversary collector's edition followed in 2024.

What is Milk and Honey about?

Milk and Honey is a collection of short poems, prose pieces and the author's own line drawings about survival: the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss and femininity, and the slow work of healing afterwards. It is organised as a journey in four chapters, the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing, and it is meant to be read in that order, from the bitterest moments toward sweetness. Kaur has said the book takes readers through the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them, because sweetness is everywhere if you are willing to look.

The four chapters

The hurting opens the book with pain: abuse, trauma and the wounds carried from childhood and from violent relationships. The loving turns to love at its warmest, for partners, for family and, running underneath, for the self. The breaking is the longest movement, the poems of a relationship ending, of loss and of the anger and emptiness that follow. The healing closes the arc: self acceptance, strength, and women lifting each other rather than competing. Each chapter, in Kaur's own description, serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain and heals a different heartache, and the poems were placed with care over weeks so the book reads as one continuous journey.

The title itself comes from Kaur's own earlier writing. On her official site she explains that a poem she wrote in 2012 used milk and honey as a metaphor for the strength and resilience of Sikh widows who survived the violence of 1984, and that the phrase stayed with her until it named this book. The design is part of the work: Kaur made the cover to look like an extension of the poems, words at the top left and an illustration at the bottom right, in the black and white style readers knew from her poem posts online.

The author

Rupi Kaur was born in Punjab and raised in Canada, and she first built her audience by posting poems and illustrations online while studying at the University of Waterloo. Milk and Honey grew directly out of that audience: a student made book, written, edited and designed by its author, that readers passed hand to hand until a major publisher came to her. Her later collections, the sun and her flowers (2017) and home body (2020), also debuted at number one, and the publisher reports that her first three collections together have sold more than 11 million copies in over 40 languages. She performs her work on stage in sold out world tours and was named writer of the decade by The New Republic.

Reception and legacy

The book's numbers are only half the story. Milk and Honey is widely credited with igniting a worldwide renaissance in poetry reading among young readers, and with defining the short, direct, illustrated style that a generation of online poets followed. Critics have argued about that style ever since, some praising its honesty and reach, others questioning its simplicity, but the argument itself is part of the book's place in literary history: few poetry collections have ever found so many readers who had never bought a poem before. For the Punjabi diaspora it carries an extra weight: one of the best known books in the world by a Punjabi writer is a young woman's account of pain, love and healing, rooted in an image drawn from Sikh women's survival.

Read it if

You are new to poetry and want the book that brought millions of readers back to it; you want a short, direct collection on trauma, love and recovery that can be read in an evening and returned to for years; or you are tracing how Punjabi voices from the diaspora reached a global audience.