Milk and Honey

The foreword is an essay written in verse. Kaur uses it to set up who she is, why she writes, what she hopes to express emotionally with her stylistic choices. While “the girl who wrote milk and honey” has “left, and lives within these pages,” Kaur now speaks as an authority, as writing made her feel “a lot more sure of [her]self” (xi). Kaur believes her work addresses both the personal and the universal: “milk and honey is what my pain sounds like. / how I cry. also my joy,” but it also reflects “our collective journey / how we mourn, smile, grieve, rejoice” (xii). 

Kaur begins with the personal. Her father is forced to leave India when she is a baby so he doesn’t wind up “imprisoned like his friends, tortured, dead, or perhaps all three” (xiii). For the first years of her life, Kaur’s grandparents are central to her upbringing.