This feels a lot less like poetry and more like modern feminist proverbs written for young scarred and ill-prepared millennials who were chucked into this patriarchal world without any kind of preparation and had to learn everything the hard way--by chance or by choice. This is a short book of proverbial empowering sayings and contemplations and declarations and confessions for a generation who might need it; this is a deeply personal 'waking up' of the author to herself... it's difficult to criticise this type of vulnerable exposure, but I'm going to try:

Look, I really love poetry. I believe reading and writing poetry makes you smarter as it requires the combined use of logic and creativity, a blend of emotion and calculation; to create rhymes with rhythm and metre, using a vast range of literary devices, and piece it all together in a flowing cascade of meaningful words is costly. To involve emotions in the work is priceless. In this work, we have the latter (emotion), but not so much of the former. In essence, it's an effort at epitomising the style of some ee cummings, but rather than sublime language, we get blunt, basic, stark eroticism…

I like poetry that flows and rhymes and is longer than 3 lines—unless it has a mic-dropping point to make, but even the master of English words in the Shakespearean punchline doesn’t deliver the sigh of satisfaction until we’ve felt the suspense of agony; the punchline comes after 3 quatrains: an introduction, the building exploration, and a cinematic climax, and then—bam! then it's delivered in a clever couplet that lands a comical blow or provokes an 'aha' moment or a smiling breath of relief. Every line cannot be a punchline or the punchline loses its punch, the reader becomes exhausted in the expression of the same pulsing emotion. Every poem cannot be a single phrased mic-drop statement, or the mic-drop loses the power of its effect.

But perhaps that is a distinguishing factor of this generation: they do not allow themselves a break from a driving intensity; they cannot for a moment stop and contemplate a process in light of the persistent demand to deliver a product. And in their world, they are the tireless (tired) product the world never ceases to malign for such minuscule imperfections. How exhausting…

All that said, and I do believe my review now contains more words than Kaur’s book of poetry, there is a place for her voice in our world, especially among this new generation of adults. Kaur lifts her voice for the sexually restrained and abused and manipulated, and she urges young women to speak up, speak out, find their own tongues and use them to good measure. There is merit to what she writes.

I just don’t know how ‘poetic’ it all is, though. I’d prefer to call it something like Kaur’s Mini Book of Mammoth Proverbs.

Sure. Some will still call it poetry.