"In grade 12, I felt like I was a sink overflowing" 💜💜💜

rupi kaur

#onherbirthdaytoday

4th October 2025

bite-sized poetry | instapoetry | visual poetry | uncapitalised poetry | erotic poetry | raw poetry | unfiltered poetry | the kaur bubble | self-published author

Rupi Kaur’s poetic sensibility is wonder-amazing!

Writing in a highly minimalistic style, and presented in short, ‘bite-sized’ format, Kaur has created a unique Kaur-ish aesthetic through her poetry.

In fact, this Kaur-ish sensibility has commanded a broad audience for her poetry, across race, milieu and moment. [quoting from Hippolyte Taine here] 😊 

One prominent feature of her poetry is the ‘visual integration’ of pairing her poem with a complementary stark line drawing, drawn by herself, which adds to the aesthetic vibes.

Moreover, she is one of the few published poets who has gained tremendous fame and popularity by sharing her poetry and illustrations on platforms like Instagram and Tumblr, and amassing a huge online fan base, before going ahead with publishing her books.

Yet another striking feature of her poetry is the absence of uppercase letters and the use of only periods as punctuation marks.

Her poetry explores a range of themes – bordering on the personal to the universal, ranging from feminism, love and identity crisis, to heartbreak, trauma and healing!

Her raw and unfiltered approach to her themes, have made her a readers’ delight!

Susan Dalzell, in her book titled Poetry 101: From Shakespeare and Rupi Kaur to Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse, Everything You Need to Know About Poetry, has some lovely lines on rupi kaur.

Here goes… from Poetry 101 –

RUPI KAUR (1992–PRESENT)

The Instapoet

Rupi Kaur is an artist and poet who came to fame through a very modern means: Instagram. As a teen, she began posting sketches, photographs, and poems on social media platforms.

She’s now published two bestselling books of poetry and amassed more than 2.6 million followers on Instagram, nearly 483,000 on Facebook and almost 200,000 on Twitter. As a poet, she’s attained a level of celebrity status usually granted to musicians or actors.

Kaur was born in Punjab, India, in 1992. When she was three, she emigrated with her Sikh parents to Ontario, Canada, where her father found work as a truck driver. She has three younger siblings.

As a kid, Kaur enjoyed writing and drawing, encouraged by her mother. In her teens, she began blogging and posting to Tumblr, publishing under her own name by 2013.

Instagram, however, proved to be the perfect match for her mix of art and poetry.

She grew a steady, if not overwhelming, following for the brief poems she published there, usually illustrated by one of Kaur’s doodle-like line drawings. 

Kaur was encouraged by her online audience to compile the poems into a book. Rather than try to go the route of a traditional publisher, Kaur decided to put the book together on her own.

Using Amazon’s CreateSpace, she self-published her first collection of poems and sketches, Milk and Honey, in 2014.

Her ascent to Internet celebrity was unrelated to her poetry.

In early 2015, as a student at the University of Waterloo, Kaur published an Instagram photograph of herself lying on a bed, wearing sweatpants with a stain from a menstrual blood leak. 

Kaur had had her sister take the image for her, as part of a class assignment on breaking taboos. Instagram removed the photo, prompting Kaur to accuse them – emphatically - on Tumblr and Facebook of misogyny. Her Facebook post went viral and Instagram responded by reposting the photograph.

The kerfuffle raised Kaur’s online profile significantly, and she became an Internet spokesperson for feminism.

As Kaur’s name ricocheted around the Internet, sales for milk and honey skyrocketed, attracting the attention of Andrews McMeel Publishing. 

They approached Kaur about reissuing the book. Since it was released in 2015, it has sold an unprecedented more than 2.5 million copies. 

Its success was startling, especially for a new poet: the book remained on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback trade fiction for nine weeks in a row.

Her second collection, the sun and her flowers, was published in October 2017. Its sales have also been strong: it ranked Number 1 on the Publishers Weekly trade paperback list for its first ten weeks.

That’s the fame piece. Now, what about the poetry?

Kaur’s poems are brief and to the point, sometimes only a sentence or two, perfect for framing within an Instagram square.

Her themes tend to revolve around her experiences as a young woman. She writes about relationships, heartbreaks, self-care, nature, friendships, and quite often, about female empowerment. 

The poems are emotional and heartfelt, which wins her both admirers and detractors.

Kaur eschews capitalization and all punctuation except periods. In some interviews, she has said the choice is a nod to her parents’ native language of Punjabi. It can be difficult to be a woman writing online. The medium is notorious as a venue for cruelty.

Parody poems of Kaur’s work abound, taking on lives of their own in mock Twitter and Instagram accounts. Her taunters take nearly any sentence, insert random breaks, and throw a “—Rupi Kaur” at the bottom, turning nonsense into “poetry.” An entire book of such poems, called Milk and Vine, has become a bestseller on Amazon.

Kaur’s poetry resonates with a large demographic who find she articulates feelings and emotions they have trouble articulating for themselves. 

Whether legions of those new readers will make the leap to discover other poets, or will remain firmly in the Kaur bubble, remains to be seen.

In yet another candid conversation with Young Poets Network, rupi kaur says –

In grade 12, I felt like I was a sink overflowing. And whenever someone asked me, what’s wrong, what’s going on, I would say I don’t know. I don’t know was my response to everything. I wanted to figure that out and fill it with something very specific.

Growing up, I was shy; coming from a strict Indian family, I wasn’t allowed to wear certain clothes and so on. 

But in the first week of grade 12 I got out of an abusive relationship and did something totally out of my character: I went to this poetry slam. I don’t know why I went there – I was just excited to explore all the stuff I wasn’t allowed to because of this terrible relationship.

So I wrote this poem for performance, and I was hooked. That was the first moment in my life when I remember people listening and paying attention to me. 

Hearing my voice in that microphone and seeing 25 people listen to it – it was life-changing.

Eventually my friends started to say, maybe more people should hear that poem than the 100 people in that room. 

I was writing a lot about the violence that brown women feel, specifically Punjabi women in my community, and they said, you know, they live all over the world. So I started posting poems on blogs, videos, social media, and over time, it became more refined.

I think my first Instagram post was in 2013. I didn’t even like Instagram at the time, but this guy I was dating kept telling me to get it to share my paintings and artwork, and I kept saying no. 

He ended up cheating on me, and to get back at him I made an Instagram and began sharing my paintings, illustrations and cute photos of myself. Then I asked my friend one day at university, should I post this poem online?

She said yes, so I did.

At the time I had around 100 followers, but suddenly these women from all over the world, of all different ages, started to gather in my comments section and talk about the things they weren’t comfortable talking about at the dinner table.

It was pretty remarkable, so I just kept sharing. I didn’t mean for it to go anywhere – I was in school, focusing on getting my degree and becoming a lawyer, and travelling on the weekends to perform my poetry.

But I had to write the poems to help myself, and I think that’s the only reason they’ve connected with people.

I ended up self-publishing milk and honey because my creative writing professor told me there was no market for poetry. I felt like I had a body of work that needed to be read cover to cover. And I got rejected of course – everyone gets rejected.

So I decided to self-publish, even though my professor told me not to because I would be surpassing ‘the gate-keepers’ and people wouldn’t like that. I was like, I don’t even know who these people are! I’m just a broke college student and I’ll never interact with them, so I just did it.

There’s a poet named Lang Leav and I was reading about how she had self-published and was later picked up by a publisher – that inspired me. 

I learned that Amazon’s CreateSpace was completely free, so I sat for a week in my house with my girlfriends and learned Adobe InDesign through YouTube. I made a lot of mistakes. I had to restart and reformat that 200-page file at least three times. But I didn’t have any other choice,

says rupi kaur. 

Here’s wishing rupi kaur a very happy birthday. 💜 May her tribe increase! 😊

Picture and Interview Courtesy: ypndotpoetrysociety.orgdotuk

Book Citation: Susan Dalzell’s Poetry 101: From Shakespeare and Rupi Kaur to Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse, Everything You Need to Know About Poetry, 2018.