Milk and Honey

Kaur includes line drawing illustrations for at least half of her poems. These primarily relate to the text, illuminate some aspect of the poem that is otherwise obscure, or serve to reinforce symbols and motifs. For example, one poem is illustrated with a rose, and states, “you were temptingly beautiful / but stung when I got close” (79). This should help the reader recall that the speaker compares herself to an untended “rose” (10) (See: Symbols & Motifs). An illustration of a woman with mushrooms and flowers growing out of her leg and hip accompanies a poem about hair (157); it anticipates a future poem in which the image of hair recurs—“i find hair beautiful / when a woman wears it / like a garden on her skin” (162). This adds to the circular nature of the concerns in the book.

Originally, Kaur hoped to write in Gurmukhī, the script in which Punjabi is written. Its only punctuation is the period, and it does not use capitalization: “all letters are treated the same. no distinction between upper and lowercase” (xiv). To capture this uniformity in English, Kaur uses only lowercase text to combine her Punjabi and English roots. Kaur argues that this format makes her poetry “absolutely straightforward” (xiv); however, critics point out that while in Gurmukhī the lack of capital letters does not read as provocative because it is the norm, the usage of only lowercase is nonstandard in English and thus has a heightened and artificial effect. Kaur wants her words to have equal weight; her poems flow from one to another with a blurring effect, which mimics the rumination of the speaker and adds to stream of consciousness style Kaur aims at. The lack of punctuation also enhances the sparseness of her non-imagistic writing, making it feel even more declarative.

Kaur uses italics in two ways. The first is to mark interior thought since she does not use punctuation marks, as in “i want to scream and shout it’s us you fool. we’re the only ones that can bring us back together” (76). This is a common device, particular in YA fiction. She also uses italics to end poems; these italicized last lines function as either titles or comments, and have become a Kaur trademark. For example: “do not bother holding on to / that thing that does not want you // - you cannot make it stay” (141). The poet Kazim Ali is critical of this technique; he suggests excising “those summarizing phrases or words at the close of her verses. They may work as ‘hash-taggable’ metadata, but not as part of the poem’s text” (See: Further Reading & Resources).