"Dies from cringe": Video of Rupi Kaur reading Milk and Honey sparks hilarious memefest online

A video of the Canadian poet Rupi Kaur reciting her poem Milk and Honey went viral on Twitter, sparking a hilarious meme fest. Rupi is popular for writing poems in blank verse. On November 4, 2014, she self-published her first book, Milk and Honey, on Amazon’s self-publishing service called CreateSpace.

The book later went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Her writing style is quite lucid and easily comprehensible for the general public. Although Milk and Honey remained a bestseller for almost three years, some people criticized her writing for its lack of depth.

On April 8, Twitter user @still_oppressed dropped a TikTok clip where Rupi recited a few lines from the third section, “The Breaking,” from her collection of poems and prose in Milk and Honey. The user captioned it as:

The way Rupi Kaur read out those lines, along with certain hand gestures and facial expressions, gave some major cringe to the viewers. One Twitter user, @smolandsed, replied to the video with a picture meme in which the text overlay said:

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Twitter reacts to Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey recitation

Though the 30-year-old poet recited her poem animatedly, as if she was reciting slam poetry, the presentation seemed like a caricature. Several netizens unfamiliar with Rupi’s face thought it was someone else parodying the poet. The tweet by @still_oppressed has since fetched over 20 million views and 23.3K likes.

Some also praised Rupi Kaur for her marketing genius, which made Milk and Honey an NYT bestseller while grabbing her other deals. A few users also cringed at the lines she recited:

“You must have known/ you were wrong/ when your fingers were dipped inside me/ searching for honey/ that would not come for you.”

One user shared a photo of famous Victorian poet Emily Dickinson and joked that Rupi thought she was her.

The video of Rupi Kaur's dramatic reading of her poem seems to be from 2021. Back then, another Twitter user, @pradaice, shared the video, and it went viral, with the internet assembled to partake in a similar meme fest.

Although the video has a TikTok watermark and was uploaded on the platform by the poet herself, Rupi seems to have deleted the clip from her TikTok feed.

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Rupi Kaur's rise to fame and re-publishing Milk and Honey

In March 2015, Rupi Kaur posted a series of pictures on Instagram that contained menstrual blood stains on clothes and bed sheets. She was harassed over the photos by internet trolls, and the post was also twice removed from the platform for not complying with Instagram’s terms and conditions.

Rupi criticized Instagram’s censorship as misogynistic and thus implied that the platform reaffirmed what she sought to condemn. Instagram sent her an apology and cited the incident as a mistaken removal.

However, Rupi Kaur's response went viral, and she gained more followers, which subsequently led to her rising popularity as people started discovering her poetry. As she rose to prominence on social media, her book Milk and Honey was released again by Andrews McMeel Publishing.

The book was an immediate success, sold around 11 million copies worldwide, and was translated into about 44 languages.

“The Breaking,” which marks the third section of Rupi’s book Milk and Honey, is the longest in the collection. It comes after the section “The Loving,” towards the end of which the narrator says that although she has learned to experience positive feelings and love for her partner, their relationship is still far from perfect. Rather, they have more arguments than they should.

In “The Breaking,” the narrator suffers from the agony of a painful breakup while detailing the feelings of loss followed by the loneliness that accompanies this experience.