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The Sun and Her Flowers implores us to “focus on the warm energy. always. soak our limbs in it and become better lovers to the world.” The book explores the things in our lives that can bring warm energy, and the lows that can be reached without it.

Rupi Kaur isn’t afraid to dig into the pain of relationships, immigration, female infanticide, rape, and other serious topics in The Sun and Her Flowers, this Canadian author’s second poetry collection. Readers who may be triggered by these topics should proceed into the book with caution.

Past the cover, readers will find Rupi Kaur’s carefully crafted poetry laid out in chapters; each one represents a stage of a flower’s life cycle. Some poems are as brief as one or two sentences, while others fill multiple pages. Every line is written in lowercase, causing the eye to flit over each one with measured, steady grace. Most poems are accompanied by a small, loose illustration by the author, echoing the stamp of approval pressed onto documents or the wax seal finalizing someone’s letter.

Each chapter of The Sun and Her Flowers offers a self-contained message and a fragment of a larger whole. You can pick up some poetry books, flip through them, and pick a random poem to contemplate. By contrast, Kaur has ensured that each poem is made larger than the sum of its words by its place in the book’s order.

The first chapter, Wilting, expresses the pain, loss, and conflict of breaking up with a partner. Poems that offer glimmers of hope are juxtaposed with poems of fury, sorrow, or regret, successfully recreating the roller coaster of emotions that follows the end of a heartfelt relationship.

To fully appreciate these messages beyond the words in The Sun and Her Flowers, you need to slow down. Each word on the page aches to sit in your mind on its own before the next one can butt in.
 

In the 21st century, we take in more words every day than any humans before us in history; words are on our food, our buses, our labels, our phones, our computers, and so much more. Upon first cracking open The Sun and Her Flowers, your brain may read these brief poems in the same way it reads everything else – swiftly, focusing on the nouns, the long words, and the unfamiliar. You’ll be at the end of one of these two-line poems before you knew you’d begun, left wondering what all the fuss was about.
 

Kaur was one of the first “Instapoets”;  that’s how she earned her fame and, eventually, her book deal. “Instapoetry” is a newly emerged genre of poetry. Despite the broad name, this term doesn’t apply to any and all poetry that is posted on Instagram. It refers specifically to poems like Kaur’s which are brief, poignant, and use simple language. They may have been written specifically to be posted on a social media platform.
 

Whether you speak to scholars of literature or the general public, you will hear conflicted opinions about Instapoems' value and authenticity. Some praise their accessibility, thanks to the poems’ use of plain language, brevity, and universal themes. Others argue that the genre breeds vapid, inauthentic poems that are only produced to generate clicks.
 

Kaur has generated more than clicks by now. All three of her poetry collections were best-sellers in the years they came out. Her first collection, Milk and Honey, has sold more than 2.5 copies in 25 different languages since 2014.
 

Poetry is, by nature, deeply personal. The language techniques are meant to evoke more powerful emotions and memories than could be achieved in an ordinary paragraph. Kaur’s style is conversational, intimate, and seemingly free-formed. Upon closer inspection, however, the words are more complicated than expected. Rhymes and alliterations in the right places provide emphasis and flow to a poignant moment. Repeated themes crop up quietly, not forcing their way into a poem but clearly present for a keen-eyed observer.

 

If you offer Kaur your mind, she will steer it, and you will find a meaning hidden just for you within words read by millions.

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Written in February 2023 by Gabrielle Huston for a specialty arts and culture journalism class at Carleton University.