There is a hasty feeling to this book, the sense of someone fretfully and fitfully sitting in a room for a few nights, hashing it out. Later in the book, Kaur exhibits some self-awareness on this front, writing “your rushing is/ suffocating the masterpieces.” Many of the poems do feel rushed. The old themes could have been let go, or given more time to mature. The new themes perhaps needed more time to develop. There’s a “work in progress” feel to this book, but perhaps that is its charm. 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. 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.

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

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. She also provides some Troubleshooting tips, like how to deal with "Toys Everywhere," in Kid Spaces. 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.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*. 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.

home body” Cuts Through the Numbness | Arts | The Harvard “home body” Cuts Through the Numbness | Arts | The Harvard

Gaines provides good information for creating spaces. She also provides suggestions in case you don't want to remodel a whole room / house for small projects that you can do to, i.e. increase lighting in your kitchen, etc. There is something almost Sapphic to the three-line poem “why does everything / become less beautiful / once it belongs to us.” And there’s something beautiful about the fact of the plainly spoken when it has perhaps not been plainly spoken in poetry: “What if the one I want / is someone who touches me and leaves.” Here is a young woman coming to terms with the complexities of romantic love, the paradoxes of being young and a woman in this society that shames women for their sexuality. There is the need we all have for comfort, and the desire we all have for the thrill of the chase, for the untouchable, for the risky, for the dangerous. We should all be 20 and wild and in love and in doubt and chasing what we cannot have, and Kaur captures some of this feeling. She evokes the unspeakable: that there is a kind of thrill in abuse and a kind of boredom in secure love.I am a huge fan of Joana Gaines' design aesthetic/philosophy. I have followed Joana and Chip's show 'Fixer Upper' over the years and always came away with something that I truly liked. I don't prescribe to all her looks and 'distressed' being one of them, but how she approaches a space based on her clients personalities and what 'season of life' they are in, shows me the thought and care that goes into the overall design and finished product. Kaur isn’t a mature poet, but she’s finally joined the upper divisional poetry workshop. When she writes “i have never known anything more / quietly loud than anxiety,” I couldn’t help but applaud her deployment of the well-timed oxymoron. 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. 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.

Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to

It was interesting to read her take on a trans-inclusive feminism. As she is often so fixated on her womb and the "female energy" that comes out of it, I have thought many times that she excludes trans women by doing so. Maybe if she had written more than 3 words regarding this topic, her views would have been more clear to me. Where the book does more with less, it is best. The short poem, “i’m surprised I got out at all” envisions in three lines a relationship so small and entrapping, the hostage can’t “see the exit.” The claustrophobia of the relationship is echoed in the claustrophobic brevity of the poem. Brava. Like I’ve said about Kaur’s other work, I wish she’d edited herself; I wish she’d separate the wheat from the chaff. Here she does it.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. 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. 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.