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milk and honey cover
FEEL THE FISSURE SEE THROUGH IT

milk and honey

by Rupi Kaur

The poems that gave survivors their words.

For you if

you grew up swallowing things that should have been said out loud.

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$15 MSRP · Paperback
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Rupi Kaur published milk and honey herself in 2014 — a slim collection of poems about surviving sexual assault, leaving a violent relationship, loving, and healing. The four sections trace a specific arc: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, the healing. The poems are spare, sometimes brutal, sometimes breathtakingly tender, accompanied by small line drawings by Kaur herself. What made it extraordinary wasn't just the content but the scale of the response: millions of people found in these poems the words they'd been looking for — especially young women who'd been taught to stay silent about the things that happened to their bodies. By 2023 it was one of the eleven most banned books in American schools. Which tells you everything about why it matters.

In effect right now

Somebody decided you shouldn’t read this. Read it this week.

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milk and honey is among PEN America's eleven most-banned books in the 2022–23 school year. Utah pulled it statewide in August 2024. Multiple Missouri school districts banned it in 2023. Texas included it on a list of fifty books targeted for school library removal in 2022. The stated reason, nearly everywhere, is 'sexually explicit' — applied to poems about surviving sexual assault. That framing tells you exactly what's happening: content about violence done to women's bodies gets treated as if the poems themselves are the violation. The real threat is a book that tells young women they can put language to what happened to them and survive it. That's what they're banning.

The record

  • Utah

    Aug 2, 2024

    Removed statewide (state law or state board rule) · Every public K–12 school

    Public libraries (students may not bring copies to school)

    Initiated by: government or statute

    In effect nowLast verified Oct 2, 2026Source ↗

Where This Book Lives

Themes
bodily autonomybook banningcensorshipfeminismgrief and losslove and desireshame and self-acceptance
Topics
book banning in the united states

The schools banning milk and honey are banning a book about surviving sexual assault. They're calling it 'sexually explicit' — which, applied to poems about abuse, is a near-perfect demonstration of the problem: the systems that produce the silence are the same systems enforcing it. Kaur wrote these poems to give language to experiences that get hidden; the bans are trying to take that language away again. There's something so self-defeating about removing healing poems from school libraries that it would be funny if the consequences weren't real: the kids who need this book most are in the schools removing it. P&P puts it here for them.

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress(2002)

dir. Dai Sijie

Banned books, secret readings, and one crush.

Two city students sent to a remote mountain village for Maoist "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution discover a hidden suitcase of banned Western novels — and use them to woo the local tailor's granddaughter. Adapted from Dai Sijie's own novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.

Letterboxd ↗

Fahrenheit 451 poster

Fahrenheit 451(1966)

dir. François Truffaut

Burning books to keep everyone happy.

In a future where books are outlawed, fireman Guy Montag burns forbidden literature for a living until a young woman's curiosity about reading unsettles his loyalty to the system. Truffaut's only English-language film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in imagining resistance as an act of memory — the "book people" who become the books they refuse to let die. Pedagogical in showing censorship dressed up as compassion, a government that burns literature "for everyone's peace of mind."

Letterboxd ↗