Milk And Honey Reading

[Violette Taps]

milkand honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain, heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

There is no rhyme or reason to this, no rhythmic qualities or underlying purpose of writing the poems this way. Kaur does a great job of bringing out emotions from the readers, using pathos to make them understand. This is the strongest point of milk and honey and one of the reasons why I think so many people like this collection. She writes about many important ideas of feminism and being a woman and heartbreak.

This can be seen all around YA literature as more and more authors are throwing plot twists and adding unnecessary action or steam to novels just to make sure the readers are engaged enough to finish the book.

Looking at the statistics, 50% of adults in the U.S. cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level and 45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level (Literary Project Foundation). This shows the changing dynamic of what people are reading and what they can read.

I think part of the hype surrounding milk and honey comes from how aesthetic it is with its line drawings and minimalistic style and the simplicity of the words. This is definitely what lures a lot of people in because of its pretty cover and drawings, but on a more literary standpoint, it does not make poetry.

There are still strong messages about feminism, relationships, family, and other serious topics which make this a novel choice suited for older teens & adults. Kaur shows the importance of these well, and I know this appeals to many people.

I unfortunately would not recommend milk and honey to someone looking to read poetry. I would recommend it for someone looking for an aesthetic collection of prose that can be interpreted at almost any reading level (though the subject matter is not for kids). You can get into poetry without having to cut it up with scissors to make it easier to read, you just have to find the poet you like reading and go from there.

ahaha and I totally get the whole not knowing how to rate things because sometimes I read books and have no idea what happened, but I still liked reading it even though I had no idea what happened which makes the whole thing confusing ahahah

Totally agree, you have really summarised how I felt about milk and honey! I really just did not get the hype around it, it feels amateurish. I enjoyed parts of the collection because some poems are passionate and raw. I think Kaur does a lot of spoken word poetry and I feel like this might be better performed than read?

One of the things my oldest and I have started picking up in the last year is reading chapter books together. While my little book worm started reading pretty early and loves to read on her own, there is just something about this age and being read to. You can physically see the imagination playing in their heads sometimes. And the conversation is always so good.

Stuart Little was under the Christmas tree this year and it is just one of those nostalgic books I was excited to share with her. We started reading it a few weeks back and it has been fun to share the story with her.

This simple herbal tea is warm and comforting. While dandelion root can be quite bitter by itself, when roasted it gives a warmth to the tea and to make it especially kid friendly I figured adding a cinnamon stick to stir in some raw honey would be the perfect addition. Adding a splash of raw milk or coconut milk is the perfect touch too!

The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

I stopped drinking cow's milk a long time ago after reading a book by Colin T. Campbell about the danger's of casein (the protein found in cow's milk) in humans. In recent years, there has been some research published related to the health risks of consuming cow's milk. You can read about that research here and here. Because of these links to disease, I've been gradually weaning myself off dairy and replacing it with calcium from non-diary sources (such as from plant-based foods like sweet potatoes, broccoli, collard greens, kale, brussel sprouts, beans, sesame seeds and tofu for example).

Anyway, several months ago, I was thumbing through one of my favorite cookbooks... Food 52's Vegan. In it, I came across a recipe for homemade almond milk. I had always heard how easy it was to make and honestly was embarrassed (as a food blogger) to admit that until then, I'd never made it. I mean, store bought almond milk was serving it's purpose, it was easy and tasted...ok.

That particular day I was feeling inspired by the book and I decided to give it a go. Besides, I really wasn't crazy about drinking xanthum gum (store bought versions may contain xanthum gum and often carrageenan...yuck!). Luckily, I had a cheesecloth hidden in the back of my utensil draw and almonds in the cabinet. I threw a cup of those babies in some water to soak overnight.

The following day, I woke up early so I could get a head start on the milk and have it for breakfast. I grabbed my trusty little Vitamix and dumped the almonds, some water, a few dates and vanilla extract into the blender. As it was blending, I could already smell and see the difference. The aroma of the vanilla and dates sent me into a trance. I watched it become thick and frothy in just one minute flat. When I opened the lid, the smell was heavenly. I took a scoop of the frothy milk and tasted it...OH MY GOD! This was not the almond milk I had once known.

It was time to strain it through the cheesecloth. As the milk flowed through the cheesecloth and dripped down my fingers, I felt like I was being transported back in time, to a farmhouse where the early morning breakfast was being prepared from scratch. That simple act transformed me, even if just for a few minutes and I loved it!

Currently, I use my homemade almond milk in teas, with cereals and granola and I drink it (or should I say, gulp it) with my favorite cookies. Smoothies have taken on a new meaning. Even the kids like it! It's that good!

There are so many ways to sweeten up and even spice up the flavor of almond milk. I love using dates as a sweetener, but for this recipe, I naturally sweeten up the milk using honey. Honey has so many health benefits and contains natural healing enzymes that support the immune system (who couldn't use a little of that?). And with fall in full swing, I thought the warmth of some pumpkin pie spice (which contains cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg) would be a really special addition.

A few years later, I lost religion. I continued to reread the Old Testament long after giving up prayer. By then my family had moved to California. Under that terrifying expanse of Western sky, I anchored myself in the old story of the world as a place infused with meaning, wonder, flashes of justice and grace. The syntax of the King James translation is brutal and beautiful; I suspect that it moves beneath my prose, invisible yet substantial, bones beneath the skin.

Perhaps this smacks of sacrilege, but just as I saw little distinction between the emotions at the core of religion and science fiction, so I failed to see the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, literary realism, magical realism and pulp. Say a child steps through a wardrobe to find a vast, snowy forest; say a band of outcasts wanders for 40 years in the desert before discovering their land of milk and honey; say a teenager traces the orbit of two moons in an alien sky; say a refugee from Oklahoma beholds the fertile swells of California: each is the story of the ordinary world as an aperture to wonder.

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

I was also trying to survive the publication of my first novel. I had not prepared for the vast sense of loss that swept in when writing, once my private refuge, became public. The vulnerability of this event is usually balanced by the consolation of community, but in the isolation of 2020, I had no chance to meet readers face to face, or share rooms with booksellers and writers. I never saw my book in the physical world. I had only my loss. Writing seemed void of its original meaning. And then, in the spring of 2021, I ate a meal, and I wrote a book.

My second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, concerns a chef who faces, in the starkest way, the quandary of seeking pleasure in a dying world. The novel asks, where do you go when what you love loses meaning? How do you contend with the immensity of that grief? Is it possible to find a source of meaning again, deep within yourself?

My own body came alive again in 2021, on the evening of my first meal out with a friend. We gathered in the courtyard of a Filipino restaurant in Seattle. Stiff after long isolation, we moved through the necessaries: health, work, hardship, loss. And then the food arrived. A pause; the air shifted. We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to our mouths and hands at the table. For a few moments, there was nothing else to think about. No way to be but human.

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