the sun and her flowers

the sun and her flowers (2017) is Rupi Kaur’s second poetry collection. According to her publisher Andrews McMeel, this and her previous collection milk and honey (2014) have together sold eight million copies and been translated into over 40 languages. the sun and her flowers appeals mainly to a young audience who may have first become acquainted with Kaur’s work on Instagram, the social media site where many of her poems, including those in the sun and her flowers, were first published. (Kaur has nearly four and a half million followers on Instagram, and many of her poems receive hundreds of thousands of “likes.”) Themes of the collection include love, relationships, heartbreak, trauma and abuse, immigration, family, and community.

Kaur styles the collection entirely in lower-case letters, including proper nouns. With the exception of apostrophes to indicate possessives and contractions, there is scant punctuation. The exceptions are in the occasional prose paragraphs, which Kaur punctuates with periods (one also utilizes em dashes). Kaur illustrates many of the poems with simple line drawings that appear on the same page as the poem. Admirers of Kaur’s work praise it for its emotional honesty and accessibility and for creating interest in poetry among a younger generation.