Milk and Honey

“The Problem with Rupi Kaur’s Poetry” by Chiara Giovanni (2017) 

In this Buzzfeed article, Giovanni objects to Kaur speaking for a collective group: Her “use of unspecified collective trauma in her quest to depict the quintessential South Asian female experience feels disingenuous.” Giovanni believes that “there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma.” Kaur’s confessional poetry draws on the lives of women whom she doesn’t acknowledge; her primarily white audience does not read into her poems any “specific issues of race and diversity.” 

“No Filter” by Soraya Roberts (2018)

In The Baffler, Roberts criticizes Instapoetry, and by extension, Kaur, whom she views as writing not for art’s sake but for commodification: “Rupi Kaur [may be] fast, inspirational, inclusive, and beautiful,” but there is nothing innovative or well-crafted about her poetry. Kaur’s aphoristic platitudes are a popular product for mass consumption; Roberts contends that Kaur manipulatively uses “female and immigrant oppression, a context in which judgment is tantamount to muting the disenfranchised” to silence criticism. Roberts is dismayed that Kaur “regularly conflates art and commerce, presenting aestheticized vulnerability with the objective of selling it.” 

“On Instafame and Reading Rupi Kaur” by Kazim Ali (2017)

In this article for Poetry Foundation, poet Kazim Ali contends that while Kaur’s critics have valid points and that Kaur might benefit from more study of poetry, her popularity cannot be ignored. While Ali agrees that her work lacks poetic merit, he notes that “no criticism has been leveled at Kaur that hasn’t been similarly leveled at ‘actual’ poets” like Mary Oliver, Jane Hirschfield, or Lucille Clifton. Ali also defends Kaur’s “‘pimping’ our culture by using what appeals to a mass audience”; while she is as a Westerner, her “infamous photograph of her with menstrual blood” is a bold rebellion against tradition—“menstrual blood being considered in South Asian (and Middle Eastern) culture to be an actual state of spiritual as well as physical uncleanliness: women who are menstruating are not allowed in mosques and temples, or even to participate in religious rituals and prayers in their own homes, in many religions of the region.” Ultimately Ali dismisses Kaur as writing about only “the surface of situations” and failing to deliver “new moments of perception.” 

“What Is Repetition Compulsion” by Kendra Cherry, MSED (2023)

Writing for the VeryWellMind website, Cherry, a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist and psychology educator, lays out the theories behind what causes repetition compulsion, also known as trauma reenactment, a psychological condition in which people “repeatedly engag[e] in behaviors or [seek] experiences that echo early life experiences, including past traumas.” She covers how Sigmund Freud defined the condition, why repetition compulsion occurs, gives examples of it, and explains what kinds of therapies are used to help recovery. The repetition in Kaur’s speaker’s language can be seen in light of trauma reenactment.