Rupi Kaur, the Insta-poet who recently made waves on Instagram for her poems has already become a trendsetter for her kind of writings. With over 2.3 million followers, her poems on love, loss, healing, life, womanhood, feminism, sexual violence, migration among others are widely read in the Instagram community. While the fame she acquired through her writings has equally garnered criticisms, Rupi says she remains unaffected and will continue her work that has found wide acceptance majorly on the social media. The Canada-based, Indian-origin poet's first book of poetry, Milk and Honey which was self-published in 2015 was later picked up by a publisher and sold more than three million copies. The 25-year-old's second book, The Sun and Her Flowers are was published in 2017.

Her writings come with a pinch of reality, the crudity of life that will tug at your heartstrings for a moment or two. Rupi tries to create a bond with her readers carefully choosing her words and metaphors. Her illustrations are another attraction which describes the essence of her poem.  Take a look at some of her poems that has received much love on social media:

For the love of love

 

Let women empower one another

❤️

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Loving oneself

 

Empowering oneself

cointoss

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Learning to blossom

page 1 🐝

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Such is life

balance

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The power of love

happy love day ♥️ to you and yours

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All for just love, the pure one

page 43 #thesunandherflowers

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When love overflows

some of the love poetry in #thesunandherflowers was directly inspired by the folk punjabi music i grew up on. this music carries tales of love. longing. and devotion. in this particular poem i pushed the inspiration further by illustrating a very famous punjabi epic titled ‘sohni-mahiwal’ as painted by the 20th century sikh artist sobha singh. sobha singh produced hundreds of works in his lifetime touching on everything from sikh history to historical reimaginings to punjabi epics. i can confidently say that most punjabi and/or sikh households own his work. we have five! and now back to the story of ‘sohni-mahiwal’. the tale that inspired the painting 🖼 ‘sohni-mahiwal' is one of the great tragic romances of the punjab region. sohni is a young girl who falls in love with mahiwal. her family disapproves and marries her off to someone else. nevertheless sohni and mahiwal continue to meet. except mahiwal lives across the river. so to see him each night sohni crosses the legendary chenab river by using a large baked earthen pot to help her stay afloat. one day sohni's sister-in-law finds out about their meetings and replaces sohni’s pot with an unbaked one. that night as sohni makes her way across the chenab to see her lover the unfinished pot dissolves and she drowns. when mahiwal hears screaming he rushes to save sohni but it is too late and he also suffers the same fate. it is said that sohni and mahiwal reunite only in death. ~ i imagine that in this particular poem from #thesunandherflowers the character arrives on a shore to confess a love that cannot be contained any longer. i imagine the spirits of sohni and mahiwal are here. gracing the waters that once took them. greeting every lover who approaches to share their story with open hearts ♥️

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Let love spread like that

Kaur's Milk and Honey even made its way to New York Times Bestseller List. There were also claims of plagiarism against her along with backlash for her new age poetry. Rupi moved to Canada at the age of four with her parents. As per reports, she was inspired by her mother to draw and paint at a young age. She studied Rhetoric and Professional Writing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. While her writings have been termed as a solace during times of despair, criticisms continue her writing that has already begun to inspire a generation of writers. She is often appreciated for expressing complex feelings in simple words.

Lately, she was on an Indian trip for the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival 2018. The storyteller whose great pride for her roots are clearly portrayed in her writings had the audience in an uproar while on stage. Rupi who was in Forbes' 30 under 30 is an editor of the 2016 Mays Literary Anthology of New Writing from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and one of BBC's 100 women of 2017.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 19, 2018 07:00 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).