milk and honey is divided into four separate sections: "the hurting," "the loving," "the breaking," and "the healing." Each section is a compilation of poems focusing on different aspects of love, abuse, femininity, and self-discovery. "The hurting" largely confronts the speaker’s history of trauma and abuse. In several poems, the speaker indicates feeling a lack of autonomy over her own body. The next section, "the loving," explores the speaker's seemingly new and fulfilling relationship. A recurring theme in this chapter is self-love occurring alongside loving a significant other. The tone shifts in "the breaking" as the speaker explores the dark complexity of a deteriorating relationship. She dives into the differences between needing and wanting someone, as well as truly loving someone versus simply being accustomed to them. "The healing," as the title suggests, focuses largely on recovery, with a particular emphasis on self-fulfillment and self-love. The more experienced speaker of this chapter now knows, “you must enter a relationship with yourself before anyone else.”
This guide refers to the untitled poems from the collection by their first lines. In "the first boy that kissed me," the speaker shares her perspective on her first experience kissing a boy. In her memory, the boy had inherited a smell of starvation on his lips from the way his father sexually and emotionally feasted on the boy's mother. After kissing this boy, the speaker learned that her body did not belong to her. This experience left the speaker with an intense feeling of emptiness.
The speaker in "you tell me to quiet down..." asserts herself against the idea that silence is the only acceptable way for a woman to be beautiful. The speaker was not made with such a passionate nature just to have her fire be doused. She does not have a love for language just so that others can easily understand her. Her presence is a heavy, material thing made of blade and silk, and she regards herself as unforgettable and complex.
"-solo performance" is a poem about physical intimacy both with a partner and with the speaker's own self. The speaker's partner guides the speaker's fingers between her legs and tells her to make her fingers dance. The accompanying drawing depicts a dancing woman, and the title and context of the poem ("-solo performance") are indicated after the text by a dash.
In "did you think i was a city," the speaker challenges a former boyfriend concerning the way he treated her as expendable. The speaker defines who she is and who she is not using an extended metaphor comparing herself to a small and homely town (as opposed to a large and crowded city). There are no neon lights, skyscrapers, or statues in her town, but there is thunder capable of making bridges shake. Rather than be compared to meat sold by street vendors, the speaker identifies as sweet homemade jam. Instead of being like police sirens, the speaker is a crackling fireplace (still capable of burning her ex-boyfriend). She is the feeling of home and sustenance itself, and she demands to be treated accordingly.
"-kaur / a woman of sikhi" concerns the way the speaker's name connects her to a culture, identity, and higher purpose. The name Kaur frees and uplifts the speaker, reminding her that she is equal to men in spite of sexism existing in the world. The sense of belonging that this shared name affords the speaker humbles her and directs her to uplift other women in need. Kaur is a name that runs through the speaker's blood in a primordial way, and it serves as both her identity and liberation.
