Kaur wrestles with the consequences of her own success in Home Body. At 28 years of age, Kaur has done the impossible. She has sold over 8 million copies of her books of poetry. Can she top herself? Can she grow and maintain her audience? If her audience grows with her, I think she can do both, just not quite in this book. Everything she wrote is way too general. There is more to dive into, there has to be. Instead of her writing about how she wants to be in the present over and over, how about describing the present around her. How does she wake up? What surrounds her home? What's inside her home? What does she do to relax or when she's alone? I think people need to stop describing themselves like warriors and survivors and definitely stop making themselves victims and instead open up. Tell me who you are. All I know about Rupi is that she is a woman of color, but you can just google search her for that. Everything is so vague. There's nothing deep here. I wanted to think that as a poet she will develop and become a better writer. Unfortunately, I think she is regressing, because this is the same stuff she has been selling. TRANSPARENCY....i feel that rating poetry is a very touchy line to run your finger across. The art doesn't judge itself, people judge the art. So with that being said I believe Homebody deserves a five star rating. Rupi Kaur just wrote another book that reflects her own unique experience in life. For that she did great expressing herself...I can now note what I did or didn't like about this collection. If reading such lines still make us feel uncomfortable then I feel we still have a long way to go. I feel we need to express ourselves and it's our right to celebrate our bodies and our thoughts which others are so ready to judge and demean. Where was Rupi Kaur and her poetry when I was in my teens and 20s? My younger self would have been obsessed with her words, found healing and solace within them.

home body – Rupi Kaur home body – Rupi Kaur

There are too many ideas here competing for airtime. Kaur has lifted her poetic antennae, received the signals of the culture, and taken her notes. I wonder what would happen if she approached her next book in a more organized manner, with a clearer mission; I wonder what would happen if she pushed her work, really challenged it. Kaur writes: “the future/ world of our dreams/ can’t be built on the / corruptions of the past.” If Kaur is to move forward and grow as a poet, I think she needs to let herself change, to risk a transition. The broad ideas in her collection are powerful, exactly because of their universality, but the execution is just not. She capitalizes on that. Good for her, don't get me wrong! but this is not poetry. Also, I find it disappointing that her work does not foster public discourse. She conveys a simple and very agreeable message and it ends there. She is not engaging with us! I am not even sure she actually can. Her goal is accessibility but poetry has never been about *simplicity* and *mass culture or readership*.

But, hey if it's not broken, don't fix it right? Oh wait... Doesn't she hate capitalism? The hypocrisy. If she truly, TRULY, hates the system, HATES capitalism, she would have gone balls deep into this. She would have broke all boundaries, took a chance on a new writing style. You can't stay stagnant as an artist. Yes, you can have a style, but it's fun evolving and she claims she changes every month. Well, it's not being shown through her writing. Amazing, I love every part of it. This is my second poetry by Rupi and this is as good as the other one I read. The writing is great and very relatable, I love that about this book. Below are some quotes from the book.

Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Leave

home body” is the newest collection from Rupi Kaur, the pioneer of social media poetry whose first collection “milk and honey” stole the position of best-selling poetry collection of all time from “The Odyssey.” Kaur communicates everyday experiences of womanhood, trauma, migration, love, loss, and self in the form of straightforward, minimalist poems accompanied by emotionally honest line sketches. Her latest release, “home body” is an organic continuation of her previous two works in style and subject material. Rather than being redundant, it is Kaur’s distinctive emphasis on the self that firmly grounds her poems, along with her deeper exploration of heavier material — like depression, anxiety, and self-hate — that provide more substance to undergird her characteristically lavish and radical affirmations. A deeper vulnerability, coupled with her poems’ famous but oft-ridiculed simplicity, creates an uncomplicated, powerful final product. Though I think young women would benefit the most from Rupi's words, I recommend this book to anyone struggling with issues of self worth or past abuse. Homebody has a lot of art illustrated by Rupi. That alone always magnetizes me to read her books. To me, some of her illustrations are slightly child like...but for some reason I enjoy them and the creativity behind them. I don't think as many illustrations existed in Homebody like the last 2 books Rupi has written. Regardless, they are very nice to look at. I love that most of the twenty-two "case study" homes, introduced at the beginning of the book, are a blend of the six foundational styles (farmhouse, modern, rustic, industrial, traditional, boho); I didn't love that the book is then organized room by room, so it isn't easy to follow which home is which or to really get a good feel for each home as a whole. The most hard-hitting, liberating read for me is the first section which actually made me come out of my comfort zone of thinking and believing in what we women ought to believe.Poetry is all about the art of mastering transitions: verbal transitions, thematic transitions, and the life transitions that often become poetry’s finest subject matter. Kaur’s verses use metaphors and similes that spatialize and give form to mind, body, and identity, helping to conceptualize how each plays a part in our emotions. She alternately characterizes these elements as objects, imprinted upon by our experiences, or as individual beings with their own sense of agency. For example, the poem “there are miracles in me / waiting to happen / i am never giving up on myself” poses the self as divine and also mysterious, consisting of unexplored portals. The poem “there is a conversation / happening inside you / pay deep attention / to what your inner world / is saying” makes one conscious of the different components that coexist to make up a person. Through this internal world-building and grandiose, celestial imagery, Kaur provides a compelling understanding of the human body that doesn’t just deserve to be loved, but demands it. Summary: A great design book for beginners, without much specific advice, but with pictures arranged to help you figure out your own style.

Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to

Home Body would make a wonderful gift for young women on your list, especially those who are struggling to overcome abuse or sexual assault, or simply struggling to find, to love, and to accept themselves in a world that consistently places unrealistic demands upon young women. A world that determines her value by how much she produces or what she can offer to a man. And perhaps, as a “young adult” book of poetry, there is an appeal to something written more for commiseration than introspection. As a teenager I read Arthur Rimbaud and Mary Karr, and I relished in their depths, in their ability to be indirect at times, in their ability to push the language to its limits. Pushing the language to its limits is not Kaur’s project. The writing. Mind. Heart. Rest. Awake. Those are the four segments in this collection of poetry. Each offers an honest look at some key moments in her (and our) life that ultimately helped shape the woman she has become. Some poems will make you a little uncomfortable, some will force you to take a closer look at yourself and others will make you smile. But there will never not be one moment when you don't feel.. something. I didn't read most of the book, but I did get some good inspiration from the multitude of pictures that were included (and their captions)!I find the writing thoroughly genuine and refreshing. I appreciate it more when the author expressed her concern over the unrealistic expectations to write more so that her work would bring her 'more' of what others believe would bring.