Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Leave

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home body” is the newest collection from Rupi Kaur, the pioneer of social media poetry whose first collection “milk and honey” stole the position of best-selling poetry collection of all time from “The Odyssey.” Kaur communicates everyday experiences of womanhood, trauma, migration, love, loss, and self in the form of straightforward, minimalist poems accompanied by emotionally honest line sketches. Her latest release, “home body” is an organic continuation of her previous two works in style and subject material. Rather than being redundant, it is Kaur’s distinctive emphasis on the self that firmly grounds her poems, along with her deeper exploration of heavier material — like depression, anxiety, and self-hate — that provide more substance to undergird her characteristically lavish and radical affirmations. A deeper vulnerability, coupled with her poems’ famous but oft-ridiculed simplicity, creates an uncomplicated, powerful final product. She punctuates her section on love with: “masturbation/ is meditation,” reminding her readers “i’m careful about/ who i spend my energy on.” The section of Home Body called “Heart” really should be called “Body.” I am a huge fan of Joana Gaines' design aesthetic/philosophy. I have followed Joana and Chip's show 'Fixer Upper' over the years and always came away with something that I truly liked. I don't prescribe to all her looks and 'distressed' being one of them, but how she approaches a space based on her clients personalities and what 'season of life' they are in, shows me the thought and care that goes into the overall design and finished product. I find the writing thoroughly genuine and refreshing. I appreciate it more when the author expressed her concern over the unrealistic expectations to write more so that her work would bring her 'more' of what others believe would bring.

Home Body by Rupi Kaur | Goodreads Home Body by Rupi Kaur | Goodreads

I love that most of the twenty-two "case study" homes, introduced at the beginning of the book, are a blend of the six foundational styles (farmhouse, modern, rustic, industrial, traditional, boho); I didn't love that the book is then organized room by room, so it isn't easy to follow which home is which or to really get a good feel for each home as a whole. Receiving this book as a Christmas present from my son this past year, was a delight. I have slowly gone through each section reading and viewing the pictures of their home and others she has created, providing me with various visuals. It gives insight into how they started off and the epiphanies/lessons-learned she has garnered over the years. Kaur isn’t a mature poet, but she’s finally joined the upper divisional poetry workshop. When she writes “i have never known anything more / quietly loud than anxiety,” I couldn’t help but applaud her deployment of the well-timed oxymoron.

Homebody has a lot of art illustrated by Rupi. That alone always magnetizes me to read her books. To me, some of her illustrations are slightly child like...but for some reason I enjoy them and the creativity behind them. I don't think as many illustrations existed in Homebody like the last 2 books Rupi has written. Regardless, they are very nice to look at.

Home Body Pages 1-50 - Flip PDF Download | FlipHTML5 Rupi Kaur - Home Body Pages 1-50 - Flip PDF Download | FlipHTML5

I found the book to be more inspirational than informative — there are descriptions of different styles, lots of photographs and drawings, and some general advice about the design of different rooms (such as Entryways, Kitchens, Bedrooms, Bathrooms, etc.). Mostly Joanna wants to inspire her readers to create a cozy home in their own style, and there are some short and sweet introductory words to each type of room. Recommended for fellow Jojo fans. I did enjoy the long stories in Homebody...as someone who is darker skinned, it makes me feel that people from other nationalities can also relate to some of the pain that comes with being a darker skin in America. Gaines provides good information for creating spaces. She also provides suggestions in case you don't want to remodel a whole room / house for small projects that you can do to, i.e. increase lighting in your kitchen, etc. Where was Rupi Kaur and her poetry when I was in my teens and 20s? My younger self would have been obsessed with her words, found healing and solace within them.

There is something almost Sapphic to the three-line poem “why does everything / become less beautiful / once it belongs to us.” And there’s something beautiful about the fact of the plainly spoken when it has perhaps not been plainly spoken in poetry: “What if the one I want / is someone who touches me and leaves.” Here is a young woman coming to terms with the complexities of romantic love, the paradoxes of being young and a woman in this society that shames women for their sexuality. There is the need we all have for comfort, and the desire we all have for the thrill of the chase, for the untouchable, for the risky, for the dangerous. We should all be 20 and wild and in love and in doubt and chasing what we cannot have, and Kaur captures some of this feeling. She evokes the unspeakable: that there is a kind of thrill in abuse and a kind of boredom in secure love. Summary: A great design book for beginners, without much specific advice, but with pictures arranged to help you figure out your own style. Her poem, “Productivity Anxiety” could have been shorter. In fact, I’d cross the whole thing out except for one stanza.

Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to

In “home body,” Kaur sets up a holy trinity for a rich life — one of mind, body, and identity. She uses her accessible and relatable writing to directly enlighten the reader. She holds space for vast emotions and, at the same time, scatters bite-sized images and pieces of language that act like rafts for the reader, providing a way out of negative rabbit holes and into portals to self-love, community, and justice. In a society where so much is wrong, Kaur assures us that all salvation ultimately comes from ourselves. When we are open to the universes inside of us, there are no limits to what we, and our world, can be. This is a lovely book about home design from Joanna Gaines. Thanks to HGTV and Hulu, I've recently become obsessed with the show Fixer Upper, and I was excited to flip through this big book and hear more from Joanna. Share a moment of time with your readers. Don't lecture them. Don't tell them things they already know. Yes, the earth is heating up. Yes, there is racism. Yes, the world is chaotic and no one will live forever. Not you. Not me. Not your mother or your father. We all experience pain. No one is special. Depression and anxiety are everyday occurrences. We are all apart of this experience. But, who are you? That's what matters. Who are your loved ones? What are some of your bad habits? What are you interested in? I didn't read most of the book, but I did get some good inspiration from the multitude of pictures that were included (and their captions)! The most hard-hitting, liberating read for me is the first section which actually made me come out of my comfort zone of thinking and believing in what we women ought to believe.There are too many ideas here competing for airtime. Kaur has lifted her poetic antennae, received the signals of the culture, and taken her notes. I wonder what would happen if she approached her next book in a more organized manner, with a clearer mission; I wonder what would happen if she pushed her work, really challenged it. Kaur writes: “the future/ world of our dreams/ can’t be built on the / corruptions of the past.” If Kaur is to move forward and grow as a poet, I think she needs to let herself change, to risk a transition. There is a hasty feeling to this book, the sense of someone fretfully and fitfully sitting in a room for a few nights, hashing it out. Later in the book, Kaur exhibits some self-awareness on this front, writing “your rushing is/ suffocating the masterpieces.” Many of the poems do feel rushed. The old themes could have been let go, or given more time to mature. The new themes perhaps needed more time to develop. There’s a “work in progress” feel to this book, but perhaps that is its charm. The broad ideas in her collection are powerful, exactly because of their universality, but the execution is just not. She capitalizes on that. Good for her, don't get me wrong! but this is not poetry. Also, I find it disappointing that her work does not foster public discourse. She conveys a simple and very agreeable message and it ends there. She is not engaging with us! I am not even sure she actually can. Her goal is accessibility but poetry has never been about *simplicity* and *mass culture or readership*. I had hoped after reading Milk and Honey ( which I review here) that Kaur would mature as a writer. In some ways, Home Body does offer us a more mature Kaur. The second poem in the book unfolds with uncharacteristic restraint. By withholding the subject of the poem, Kaur evokes a sense of suspense. It’s a simple tool in the poet’s toolbelt, but it’s promising to see Kaur taking her first steps into exploring the richness of the poet’s rhetorical options.