Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey, became a New York Times bestseller, selling over three million copies and translated into 35 languages. Her second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, also met with acclaim. Instagram poetry, or Instapoetry, which has focused on esthetics and brevity, has been mocked and derided by some for being ‘simple and shallow’. When the New Republic article went viral, it was received with both praise and criticism from both fans and detractors.

TORONTO – Brampton-based Rupi Kaur, who burst onto the Canadian literary scene with her poetry in the middle of the last decade, has been recognized as “Writer of the Decade” according to U.S. publication The New Republic.

Instagram poetry, or Instapoetry, which has focused on esthetics and brevity, has been mocked and derided by some for being ‘simple and shallow’. When this recent article went viral, it was received with both praise and criticism from both fans and detractors.

In his write-up in the New Republic, author Rumaan Alam argues that what makes Kaur writer of the decade is how she stands as a window into the future of poetry.

“She’s made a huge success with work that is really attuned to the surface of the screen. She is predicting a way of thinking about screen surface… She was one of the first writers to do that, but ultimately a lot of readers are going to think about that,” says Alam.

He goes on to say that Kaur’s work is made to be read and scrolled on social media as well as a blueprint for what’s to come.

Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey, became a New York Times bestseller, selling over three million copies and translated into 35 languages. Her second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, also met with acclaim.

With Kaur’s success, many young poets have emerged, some even citing Kaur as the reason they began to write and publish.

Rupi Kaur has published two books: 2015’s Milk and Honey, 2017’s The Sun and Her Flowers. Her epigrammatic verse is spare, the offspring of classical aphorism (if you’re feeling generous) and the language of self-help. The poems have a confessional, earnest manner; disarmingly full of feeling, they can be easy to dismiss. Nevertheless, Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet who is not yet 30 years old, is the writer of the decade, writes Alam.

Kaur’s writing is not everybody’s cup of tea but she has a huge fan following on social media. 

She writes, in her poem “the breaking”:

did you think i was a city

big enough for a weekend getaway

i am the town surrounding it

the one you’ve never heard of

but always pass through

The poem is an example of something that would click with the social media generation not attuned to the heavy metaphors of exceptional poetry but it sells.

But Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet. (Perhaps you could say the same of the novels now considered classics that were originally published serially in newspapers.) 

Kaur, born in 1992, was 15 when the iPhone debuted. The majority of her readers have never known adulthood without that gizmo’s mitigating influence. On Instagram, Kaur doesn’t just share selfies and drawings; she publishes. Kaur’s books have sold more than 3.5 million copies, an incredible number for any poet but the more remarkable when you consider that surely some percentage of her readership has never owned one of those books.

Popularity does not generally correlate to artistic significance, but Kaur’s is an unusual case. That her work crumbles under traditional critical scrutiny is not really the point. There are readers who will forever think of Kaur as the first poet they loved. Even if they outgrow her—as is inevitable: the lines in Milk and Honey will be a common text for the fortysomethings of 2035, writes Alam.

This is a different matter from a shared pop culture touchstone, such as Top 40 songs or sitcoms. The mantle of poet accords Kaur a kind of legitimacy, as it always has; you could write about her work for your college application essay. Readers who know about poetry might think Kaur’s work is dumb; those for whom Kaur is their first exposure to the medium think it profound. It doesn’t matter if you believe that title of poet belongs only to the likes of Wallace Stevens or Gwendolyn Brooks. Kaur has seized it for herself.

And she deserves it. Kaur cannily understands the contradiction that we want technology—in this case, a very powerful computer—to connect us to real people. She uses her verse, her drawings, her photographs, to give us persona, which is the next-best thing, and also an age-old poetic technique, concludes Alam, who is the author of the novels That Kind of Mother and Rich and Pretty.