Instapoet, instabot?

home body Rupi Kaur Simon & Schuster

Rupi Kaur, 28, might be the world's most popular living poet. The daughter of a truck driver, she moved to Canada from India when she was three and self-published her first book at 22. That book, Milk and Honey, and its followup, The Sun and Her Flowers, have together sold more than eight million copies.

“Instapoetry” — short poems by writers who build an audience by self-publishing on Instagram — is the most commercially significant new literary genre to have emerged in the past decade. Kaur is its queen.

Lowercase and mostly unpunctuated, her poems are written to salve pain — her own and the pain of her readers. Milk and Honey begins with the lines: “my heart woke me crying last night/ how can i help i begged/ my heart said/ write the book.”

In home body the poet, famous but miserable, is urged once again to “write the book” — though not by her heart: “write the book they said/ get back on the road again/ what's taking you so long.” The pressure manifests in such titles as “productivity anxiety” and “productivity guilt.”

Critics savaged Kaur's first two books, but I found parts quite moving. Her sharpest images had undeniable power. From Milk and Honey: “he guts her/ with his fingers/ like he's scraping/ the inside of a/ cantaloupe clean.” (An image so striking she couldn't resist recycling it in her second book.)

That kind of bold metaphor has all but vanished in home body, along with most concrete nouns and, for much of the book, any clue it was written by a specific human being. Kaur's early poems about heartbreak, body image and sexual assault felt universal because they seemed so personal. home body sets out to be universal but sounds like a bot.

Kaur was mocked for metaphors such as “i was music/ but you had your ears cut off,” but they were hers. I miss them.

People who have been bullied sometimes respond by trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves. It's the antithesis of Kaur's self-empowered ethos, but it's what these poems are doing; so many are one-line statements in featureless, businesslike language, all distinguishing marks filed off.