The Sun and Her Flowers

The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur
250 pages
Published by Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2017
Genre: Poetry
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Re-readability: This is one of those books that I’ll be pursuing again and again over the years.

Reviewed by Indiana

The Sun and Her Flowers is a collection of poetry about what life is like as an immigrant, about sexual abuse, about love, about living, about respecting your roots and rooting for others. But it’s so much more.

No matter how fond you are (or aren’t) of poetry, Rupi Kaur writes with such raw emotion and almost in prose-like fashion that it’s hard not to find something to identify with. She doesn’t strain what she’s trying to say through a specific meter, or through a formal style of poetry.

Instead, she simply comes out and says what she means in the most concise and intense way.

A line or two of her poetry gives me a better sense of what it really means to be an immigrant than an entire chapter in any other book I’ve read: “their bodies/ were hard at work paying in blood and sweat for their/ citizenship” and “leaving her country/was not easy for my mother/i still catch her searching for it/in foreign films/and the international food aisle.”

Kaur divides the book into five sections: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. The each section is packed with poetry revealing all the ways we all wilt/fall/root/rise, and bloom, in love and in life. Kaur weaves in environmental metaphors with romantic themes, creating something that feels genuine and tender.

Throughout the collection, there are also loose drawings paired with the poems. It’s an interesting choice, another one that I consider unconventional. At times, it helps give life to the poem, other times I find them a bit distracting.

For anyone who read Kaur’s first book of poetry Milk and Honey and loved it, The Sun and Her Flowers will not disappoint. It actually made me go back to revisit some of the poems from Milk and Honey that I’d since forgotten about. I’m already excited for the next collection.