I met a boy recently and I awoke one morning to find on his bedside table a book of Kaur's. Though he is not literary, he knows that she isn't very good and that the subjects are cliche, but likes her anyway in a sort of guilty pleasure way for people whose main interests are not poetry. I think the majority of her readers acknowledge that she isn't great. They like her because poetry for them (by which I mean, non-poets) is just a way to express themselves with no claims to high art. Kaur doesn't bother me and in a few years will be forgotten.
More dishonest are the academy poets (found at AWP, MFA programs, and all the right journals) who defend her work because she is South Asian and female and therefore beyond criticism (as Kazim Ali did in a recent, cowardly essay). Or those same poets who believe writers like Vuong are high art when such writers are barely more literate than Kaur.
I like Kaur. She has managed to mock so many academy poets by refusing to do any of the things poets are supposed to do--read each other's work, buy each other's books, publish in journals, attend conferences--while coming out ahead of them all, if coming out ahead means selling the most books.
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