Many of the poems have accompanying artwork, spare depictions of scenes in lines and curves, but never complex. Kaur uses white space simply, and decreases the length of the line sometimes to be more percussive, while letting some lines wax further, usually with more multisyllabic words. Some pages have a single line like “you break women in like shoes” One poem, “questions,” uses anaphora quite a lot, and the title poem uses italicized dialogue, and, because most of the poem is a conversation (“together we are an endless conversation,” she adds later), we realize the deliberate engagement in love that is often absent from her other pieces. My favorite in this vein is “- our souls are mirrors,” which I will not quote here but hope you go seek it.

The poems are about love (“a double-edged knife”), addiction, immigration, betrayal, loss, self-love, therapy, motherhood, insecurity, and (in a dramatic piece entitled “home”) sexual assault. Despite the collection’s title, there are more dark clouds than sunshine in these pages. I like several of the small pieces like “the irony of loneliness/is we all feel it/at the same time//- together.” I liked this one too: “this place makes me/the kind of exhausted that has/nothing to do with sleep/and everything to do with/the people around me.” It’s clear, pointed writing, and a colorful expression of a relateable sentiment, and Kaur does this with deliberately unsophisticated language and bland line terminals like “has” and “with,” giving me a feeling of surrender and suppression of will. Indeed, Kaur does not often use concrete language, and the economy makes it more impactful when she does employ vivid imagery: “i peeled my skin off just to feel awake/wore it inside out/sprinkled it with salt to punish myself.” That is going to leave a mark.