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VUE | Winter 2018

The Digest | New Jersey Magazine

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touring so much and I kind of lost that relationship with my art, and because I wasn't present enough to practice it everyday. But I've been writing since then, a heavy chunk of this year and last year has been focused on putting it all together, and it was months of waking up everyday and writing until I go to sleep." At a glance, "e Sun and Her Flowers" is everything you'd expect from Kaur. Admirers will over pine over the intricacies of her line drawings. e poems themselves are still lowercase, punctuation-less and small enough to fit the shape of your screen. But this time, instead of "the hurting", "the loving", "the breaking" and "the healing" — Kaur focuses on the "wilting", "falling", "rooting", "rising", and "blooming". What's different is that Kaur isn't asking you to look inside yourself, she's asking you instead to look out into the world. "e Sun and Her Flowers" considers things like life, loss and loneliness with a maturity and wisdom that "Milk and Honey" could not. It reflects the ways in which Kaur herself has grown as a writer, artist, poet and woman. She explained to Szkutak, "I never thought that I would write about family and now there's an entire chapter in this book about family, and I never had the tools to do that before. I never thought I'd write poems about death, or these broad- like spectrum poems but I was able to get to a place where they kind of, sort of just came naturally." Kaur also touches upon themes like immigration, feminism, Sikh genocide and what it means to grow up with English as your second language. On its own, "e Sun and Her Flowers" lives up to the hype. It may not have reached coffee-table status like its sister just yet, but Kaur's second coming promises nothing less than a journey through raw, untapped emotion. Since her rise to fame as "Instapoet", Kaur has only further ignited a new generation of young creatives who, like her, challenge criticism, push boundaries and define their own versions of freedom. VUE ON ART V U E N J . C O M 85

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