Yes, The Sun and Her Flowers Is Banned!

Rupi Kaur’s follow-up to Milk and Honey is organized around five themes: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. The collection expands beyond the personal trauma focus of her debut to explore immigration, displacement, ancestry, and the experience of being a brown woman in a world that fetishizes and marginalizes her simultaneously. Kaur’s signature style, lowercase text, minimal punctuation, simple line drawings, remains intact, and the poems are designed to be accessible, quotable, and emotionally immediate. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Sun and Her Flowers was challenged 10 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans in Florida, Georgia, and Iowa school districts. Like Milk and Honey, the challenges target poems that reference sexuality and the body. Kaur writes about desire, heartbreak, and physical intimacy with the same directness she brings to immigration and grief, and it’s the former that draws objections. Both of Kaur’s collections now appear on ban lists, making her one of the few poets to be systematically targeted. Poetry’s brevity means that individual poems can be isolated and presented without context, a tactic that challengers frequently use to make the content seem more provocative than it is within the full collection.