No longer did it feel like she was casting her poetry into the vast online world and waiting to see if anyone would notice. It’s been that way since, which is really cool.” “That was the moment that I was like wow, this is crazy. As she neared the bookstore she saw a long line that snaked down four blocks and realised the crowd was there to see her. The reach of her writing hit her at a reading in San Francisco last year. “How does a 50-year-old white woman relate to this?”
The book climbed bestseller lists, earning Kaur an audience far beyond those she had captured through social media. The book was re-released in October 2015.
“There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman,” she says. It was a bold move, one made amid warnings that self-publishing would bar her from prestigious literary circles.īut the traditional path of submitting her work to anthologies, magazines and journals was yielding little success. In 2014 she self-published a collection of her poetry, accompanied by her own sketches, titled Milk and Honey.
They stayed for the poetry and that was such a beautiful gift in disguise.” “That was really scary,” she says over coffee one sunny afternoon in Toronto. She began releasing short poems to her followers – simple, raw lines that tackled tough topics such as rape, domestic violence and alcoholism. A spoken word artist who had been told at times that she was too aggressive for certain venues or made some people uncomfortable, Kaur wondered if her hundreds of thousands of followers would all stick around for what was coming next. Insults and death threats were launched at Kaur, but her followers on Instagram grew seven times over. Followers flocked to her, cheering her on as she added, “I will not apologise for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but not be okay with a small leak.” She pointed out the hypocrisy of being censored by a site that readily publishes photos of underage girls who are “objectified” and “pornified”.
After Instagram banned a photo, published as part of a university assignment, showing Kaur lying in bed with her pyjamas and sheets stained with a small amount of menstrual blood, Kaur fought back. It was the latter that catapulted Kaur into headlines in 2015. This young poet from the suburbs of Toronto has fashioned a career out of forcing herself into places where she’s least expected whether it’s the New York Times bestseller list or challenging social media to rethink how it sees menstruation. The night out – which will mark Kaur’s 24th birthday – is rather fitting.
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