“The Instagram Poet Outselling Homer 10 to 1: Meet Rupi Kaur, Author of the Ubiquitous Milk and Honey”, 2017-10 (; backlinks):
[cf. Rod McKuen] Walking the Manhattan blocks near NYU, the poet Rupi Kaur wears a loose cream-colored suit and an air of easy self-assurance. Her hands rest in her pockets, her kimono-shaped jacket hangs open over a cropped black turtleneck, and she comfortably strides her realm: the realm of college freshwomen who have recently been or may soon go through breakups. She looks like someone prepared to tell you convincingly that “you / are your own / soul mate”, to quote one of her poems in its entirety.
Most professional poets cannot expect to be approached by fans. But milk and honey, the 25-year-old [Sikh] Punjabi-Canadian’s first collection of poetry, is the best-selling adult book in the US so far this year [2017]. According to BookScan totals taken near the end of September, the nearly 700,000 copies Kaur has sold put her ahead of runners-up like John Grisham, J. D. Vance, and Margaret Atwood by a margin of more than 100,000. (In 2016, milk and honey beat out the next-best-selling work of poetry—The Odyssey—by a factor of ten.) And because Kaur’s robust social-media following (1.6 million followers on Instagram [cf. Instapoetry], 154,000 on Twitter) has been the engine of her success, she is accustomed to direct contact with her public. So, when a young woman stops her on the way out of Think Coffee—“I love your work!”—Kaur greets her with a hug, poses for a selfie, then turns and calls back to her publicist. “She preordered the second book!”
On the gray late-summer day when we speak in New York, the 2017-10-03 rollout of Kaur’s second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, is well underway. Entertainment Weekly has published an exclusive look at the book’s cover. Kaur has shared photos of its design (white background, black text, geometric sunflowers) painted across her nude back. And, she reports, the physical copies themselves will go to press the following day. She had scarcely finished finalizing details—“I’m so particular about the spacing and the page and the color”—when her publisher called to tell her that 18 truckloads of paper were on the road.
…On Amazon and Goodreads, reviewers tend to greet Kaur’s work with either total embrace (“definitely something every woman should read”) or else a kind of baffled skepticism. “I know I’m going against popular opinion here on this one, but I just…didn’t love it”, writes one. “If you want my honest opinion, it felt like I was reading angsty teen Tumblr posts for 200 pages.” Mainstream professional assessment has been limited. “Her poetry does not need heavy analysis”, The Guardian wrote, in a piece that placed her “at the forefront of a poetry renaissance in both Britain and US.” Last summer, the New York Times’ Inside the List feature credited her appeal to an “artless vulnerability, like a cross between Charles Bukowski and Cat Power.”
…When I bring up the cottage industry of parodies, Kaur laughs. “That’s what I get a lot”, she says. “Like, this isn’t real poetry so I’m just going to enter some spaces and that’s it. I’m like, oh, God.” She does not seem especially perturbed. And, perhaps, why should she? Earlier in our conversation, Kaur’s constellation of gold rings caught my attention as she was speaking; I compliment them, and she thanks me. “This one I got when milk and honey reached number one on the New York Times list”, she says, indicating an emerald on her left middle finger. “I got this one in Oakland, and then this one I got when I finished writing the manuscript, and then this one was for selling over a million books. And then this one I got after I got all these and was like, oh, I’m just allowed to buy them now for no reason at all.”
…Kaur does not like to read when she is writing, and says that she hasn’t finished a book all year. Now that The Sun and Her Flowers is complete, though, she’s looking forward to digging into the many books she’s bought and not yet started. “I will always go into a used bookstore”, she says, even when she’s working. “I’ll collect a lot of covers that inspire me—whether it’s the paper inside, whether it’s a font, so then later I can be like, okay, how’s mine going to look?”
…On a cart at the Strand, milk and honey sits alongside Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Kaur read half of Between the World and Me. “I had to take notes”, she says—it was “more academic” than her typical reading. Recently she got Notorious R. B. G. [Shana Knizhnik & Irin Carmon], and she’s been enjoying that. “This guy is the best”, she says, noticing an edition of Kafka’s complete stories; she’s referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book’s designer. “The dream is to have him design my next book.” His work, she points out, translates well across media—to different sizes, to posters, to digital.
…Her experience at Andrews McMeel has been her first time working with an editor. Still, she’s familiar with the collaborative dynamic of a workshop from her college classes, and taught her own creative-writing classes for high school and college students while she was in school…list poetry, she adds, was one of her favorites.“It’s basically just a list of stuff”, Kaur explains. “I would ask them to write a list of things that they wish they were born with, and write the first thing that comes to mind. And then folks would write a list of 20 things, from physical things to abstract things, and it was super cool because then you would go around and you’d read them out loud and everybody had different answers. And the best part was they’d walk away, like, oh, I can do this, I’m a poet. I’m like, yeah, you are.”