the sun and her flowers

home body by Rupi Kaur (2020)

home body is Kaur’s third book. It follows the same formula that made her earlier books so successful and is illustrated with the familiar line drawings. The book is divided into four chapters: “mind,” “heart,” “rest,” and “awake.” The themes are not unlike those in the sun and her flowers, including love, acceptance, family, and community.

“Sunflowers” by Mary Oliver (1986)

Mary Oliver is a well-known American poet; “Sunflowers” was published in her collection Dream Work. It consists of nine unrhymed quatrains. A first-person speaker addresses readers directly, asking them to “Come with me” to observe the sunflowers. The poem is far more sophisticated than Kaur’s work, but like Kaur’s sunflowers, Oliver describes them with the aid of the pathetic fallacy. They are “shy / but want to be friends” (Lines 12-13) and have “wonderful stories” (Line 14) to tell.

A Strangely Wrapped Gift by Emily Juniper (2020)

Like Kaur, Emily Juniper is a successful “instapoet” whose work is also published in book form. Also, like Kaur’s milk and honey, A Strangely Wrapped Gift was originally self-published. This was in 2017, under the name Emily Byrnes with illustrations by Lizzy Duga. Since then, the book has been taken up by Central Avenue Publishing and issued under the name Emily Juniper. The poems deal with issues such as recovering from mental illness as well as getting over heartbreak, finding hope, and expanding the heart, themes that readers of the sun and her flowers will be familiar with. Like Kaur’s work, the poems are short and pithy and are illustrated with line drawings. The book is divided into five sections, largely following the seasons but with a final chapter titled “Leap Year.”

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)

The Prophet is a collection of 26 prose poems by Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran. First published in 1923, the book has been astonishingly successful and has been translated into over 100 languages. With its theme of spiritual wisdom and the profound thoughts it offers about such topics as love, friendship, joy, sorrow, and death, it has consistently been a best-seller. Kaur has acknowledged The Prophet as her favorite collection of poems, and in 2019 she contributed a foreword to a new Penguin Classics edition of the book.