The Sun and Her Flowersthe sun and her flowers

The Sun and Her Flowers, styled by its author in lowercase as the sun and her flowers, is the second poetry collection by Rupi Kaur, the Punjabi Canadian poet, illustrator and performer, published on 3 October 2017 by Andrews McMeel Publishing in the United States and Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom. Its 256 pages of short poems, prose pieces and Kaur's own line drawings are arranged in five chapters named for the life cycle of a flower: wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming. Kaur has explained the title through the sunflower, which rises with the sun and follows it around: the sun stands for a woman, and the flowers for the relationships she has through her life. A number one New York Times bestselling book that sold a million copies within months, it is the grown-up companion to her first book, Milk and Honey.

About the book

The book exists because of the success it had to follow. After Kaur self-published Milk and Honey in 2014 and Andrews McMeel republished it, she signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster, and by the time she sat down to write this second collection her first book had sold two million copies and spent more than a year on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She has described the pressure plainly: for months nothing she wrote satisfied her, because the only reason a second book would work, she felt, was if it did everything the first did and then more. In interviews she called the new book a grown-up version of Milk and Honey, deeper and more emotional. It began, she told Bustle, as two larger chapters about a woman, the Sun, and her many relationships, the Flowers, moving from an unhealthy relationship towards a healthy one, before the writing widened to take in whatever was on her mind, including death, borders and the migrant experience.

What are the five chapters?

The five chapters are wilting, falling, rooting, rising and blooming, and each takes one stage of a flower's life as one stage of a person's recovery. Wilting is heartbreak and loss, the end of an important relationship. Falling is the low ground after it, the depressive feelings that follow. Rooting turns outward and backward, to female infanticide, immigration and borders, and above all to Kaur's mother and the women who came before her: Bustle's interview singles out her writing on her mother, on the political history of South Asian women, on colonization and immigration, as the new directness of this book. Rising is the turn towards self-respect and new love, and blooming closes the book with the joy Kaur describes in coming to love and accept her roots, herself and the world around her. The publisher sums the journey up as growth and healing, ancestry and honouring one's roots, and rising up to find a home within yourself.

Themes and style

Across the five chapters the book's stated themes are love and loss, trauma and abuse, healing, femininity and the body. The poems are short, the language deliberately plain, and the drawings minimal, the same signature style as Milk and Honey, and Kaur has been clear that the simplicity is the work, not the absence of it: a poem starts long, she told Bustle, and she strips it down over weeks to its core, because she does not want the reader to spend effort decoding the words; she wants the reader to do the emotional work instead. That plainness is also the ground of the argument about her. The Guardian, writing on this collection, mocked some of the lines as overheard advice and still defended the poems as containing bravery, beauty and wisdom, arguing that her success should not be read as the death of poetry. The Sunday Times called her style artless and therefore sincere, full of determination to recover.

The author

Rupi Kaur was born on 4 October 1992 in Punjab, India, and was raised in Brampton, Ontario, where she grew up in the Sikh Punjabi diaspora and began performing poetry in 2009. 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 Instagram. The Punjabi roots are not decoration in this second book: rooting is its central chapter, and its poems about her mother, about migration and about what South Asian women have carried are the bridge between the Brampton bedroom where the poems were written and the Punjab her family left. Her own page in this Kosh tells her fuller story, and this Kosh also holds Milk and Honey.

Reception and legacy

Commercially, the second book proved the first was no accident. A week after release it ranked second on Amazon's bestseller list, within two weeks it was in the top ten of the New York Times Best Sellers list, by January 2018 it had sold a million copies, and by January 2020 it had spent 76 weeks on the New York Times list. Its publisher describes it as her second number one bestselling collection, and gives her collections together more than 11 million copies sold in more than 43 languages. Its legacy is the argument it settled and the one it started: it settled that a Punjabi Canadian poet writing short, illustrated, plainly spoken poems about women's lives could hold a mass readership across two books, and it started a lasting debate, still running, about where the line between popular poetry and literary poetry should be drawn. For Punjabi readers it remains the book in which Kaur turned from private hurt to her roots, and wrote her mother and her mother's generation into the record.

What should I read next?

Readers usually move between this book and Milk and Honey, also in this Kosh, reading the first book's hurting, loving, breaking and healing against this book's wilting to blooming. Kaur's third collection, Home Body, followed in 2020 for readers who want to continue with her work.