New York Times number one selling author, Rupi Kaur, has done it again. If you haven’t read her famous Milk and Honey, you are seriously missing out. Filled with poetry and prose there are clear themes of violence, abuse, love, loss and femininity. Her second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, is just as beautifully heartbreaking. It’s the kind of prose that will force you to open your heart and mind up to acknowledge the pain on the page, and then help put you back together after breaking you down.
As a proud Milk and Honey fan, I couldn’t wait for more from Kaur. I read her first book several hundred times within the first weeks of owning it. I told all my friends about it, and pressured them to read it too. So when The Sun and Her Flowers released October 3rd and I will proudly admit that I pre-ordered it so I could binge it the day it hit the shelves. I fell in love with Milk and Honey, and could not wait to fall in love with this one too.
So sure enough, on October 3rd there sat my package from Amazon on my front porch. I immediately went to my room and ripped apart the packaging. The front cover has a great illustration of a sunflower, and I skimmed the pages excitedly. Not being able to read it right away, I carefully set it down on my desk where it would wait for my return later that night. When I was finally able to devot time to the book, I lit a candle, put on some music in the background, and cuddled up in bed with it. Over an hour later I was more than half way through it, and crying like a baby. Rupi Kaur has this magical way of breaking your heart, and putting it back together all in one sitting.
Rupi Kaur followed the same anthology style that Milk and Honey illustrated with The Sun and Her Flowers. She broke the book down into 5 different sections: Wilting, Falling, Rooting, Rising and Blooming. Each section is full of raw, untouched emotions. Her emotions, the emotions of thousands of others, and even your own spill out onto the page. Each poem makes you think about things in a different light, and explores the emotions we often keep bottled up. I started to place myself into the poems, truly allowing myself to feel the pain she was describing. I found myself thinking of past experiences within my life, and reflected on those.
Moving from section to section, my eyes flooded with tears. Happy and sad. When I reached the end, my chest felt heavy and light at the same time. Heavy from the emotional burdens she released onto me, and lighten for accepting my own. If you haven’t picked up The Sun and Her Flowers, I hope this encourages you! Rupi Kaur is an extremely talened and beautiful writers who’s words will touch the souls of many.