I have loved everything Rupi Kaur releases since I first read her debut collection, Milk and Honey. I waited eagerly for this book. I saw Kaur perform live after her second book was released and her performance art and poetry are truly stunning. As is she.

This book, her third, chronicles the struggles she faced after her second book was published and she spiraled into a deep depression. Kaur’s poetry often examines the traumas she’s experienced, and Home Body is no different. Micro poems accompanied with ink drawings, this collection examines her experience as a woman, a victim of sexual assault, and woman of color, in even deeper ways than her other two books.

The theme I gathered most strongly from this collection was that of searching. “I want to open where I am closed / find the secret door / let me out of me” (26). There’s a sense of not being at home in one’s self, not belonging in one’s own body any more. “He made my world so small / I couldn’t see the exit” (55). It’s a displacement forced on the speaker by others.

But there was something…missing. Something that I found in her previous two books that I did not find in this one. I don’t know what it was. I’m not sure if I can or will discover it. But where I underlined almost every poem in her other two books, I really only underlined a handful in this one. Maybe the issue was in my own mind, as I have been a much more widely read poet now than when I first found Kaur’s work, but I found myself unable to really commit to reading this book. It took me ten days to finish, but not because it was long or hard to read, but because I wanted to read pretty much anything else instead.

And yet, when I finished the book, I gave it 4 out of 5 stars because, honestly, there was a version of me that loved this book. I related to much of what was written. I had written my own IG poems that were very similar to what I found in this book. I think, if I had read this book before I left my ex-husband, I might have found it more stirring.

I recommend it, even if only for the simple fact that it is a book of poetry published and distributed in a society that increasingly doubts the necessity of art and poetic expression.