Rupi Kaur: Queen of Shitty Poetry, Potential Ass-Haver?

When I started this Substack at the beginning of the month, I promised behind-the-scenes looks at my ruse poems, articles on the Pen Name Revolution, pieces apropos the horrendous mismanagement underscoring contemporary publishing. And I will continue to deliver on those promises. But if you’ll indulge me in a brief diversion, there’s another order of business I promised to attend to, and I intend to do so right here and now. That is, I’m addressing something the poetry world has been wondering about but has been too timid to broach for years now: How does Rupi Kaur’s, queen of shitty IG poetry’s, champion of “home bodies” everywhere’s, ass rank on a scale of 1-10?

I present to you the first entry in a new series—one in which we lovingly evaluate the buttocks of poetry’s pre-eminent female figures.

Note: Despite the image you have in your head of poets (good ones, at least), let’s be real—we’re not the hottest bunch anymore. The days of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are long gone. Right now, we’re working with hot celebrities pretending to be poets (Megan Fox), Instagram illiterates (Kaur), and a whole gaggle of pseudo-poets you’d have to be charitable with to grant them the designation of “poet.” But their inclusion here is great for our ass-ranking purposes, so this, we will (temporarily) permit.

Firstly, criteria. By which metrics will we be evaluating Kaur and the other poets in this titillating series? I’ve consulted experts (fellow assmen on internet forums, and friends from various group chats) from around the world and plumbed the depths of the literature (Salon.com’s “How scientifically perfect if your butt?” et al.) to determine a rubric fit for a venture such as ours. Ultimately, in this series, we’ll be using a variation of David Holmes’ Pythagorean Theorem for Certified Hound-dogs: (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V. “(S stands for shape or droopiness; C is for how spherical it is. B represents wobble or bounce, and F is for firmness. V measures hip-to-waist ratio, and T is for skin texture and cellulite.)” Because I can’t as easily assess some of these qualities, such as “wobble” or “firmness,” I’ll be replacing those with a category of my own innovation: “biteability.” (My team and I had to devise this name as an alternative to the crasser “would I wanna fuck it?”) Angle of ass (in accordance with pelvic tilt) may also be given consideration in specific instances, as it bears a significant influence on the general slope of an ass.

Note: If a girl has hip dips or dimples or something like that, we’re not going to dock major marks. All people have physical imperfections—many of which are simply genetic and can only be mitigated by or addressed with exercise or surgery. We’re poet ass-raters, not monsters. However, surgical augmentation is the cheater’s method and will be disregarded. BBLs are funny, if nothing else, but they’re the steroids of the ass-rating world, and if we’re to be gluteal purists, these simply won’t do. (That said, if poets want to start a BBL movement, I’m all for it, for the comedic potential.)

Secondly, my personal credentials: A lifelong commitment to appreciating the female form, and years of time spent online where around the corner were ass shots in every forum thread, in every website’s sidewinder porn ad, etc. My aesthetic appreciation, as well as my technical knowledge from my extensive reading on human physiology, in addition to my status as a fellow poet, would at least partially qualify me for the job. And, since no one else is bold enough to do this in public, I’m nominating myself for now.

Lastly: Why not their tits? 1) Because I’m an ass man through and through; and 2) this age-old question of tits or ass has already been settled definitively:

Back to the fanny at hand. Rupi Kaur is everything a publisher could hope for. Woman (check). Minority (check). Young(-ish) (check). Politically motivated (check). Vaguely bitchy (check).

She launched herself to stardom with her self-published Milk and Honey back in 2014, and has since landed deals for subsequent “poetry” collections with publishers like Andrews McMeel and Simon & Schuster. She’s been on world-tours promoting her work through public readings. She’s inspired a new generation of hacks to illustrate their similarly unpracticed confessionalist gush pieces in the “Rupi” style (which, some argue, is simply a rip-off of Nayyirrah Waheed’s loathesome style). All told, she’s sold over 12 million copies of her work worldwide across 40 languages (Simon & Schuster).

The real question, though: She might be a publisher’s wet dream, but is her ass nice enough to be part of our wet dreams?

As it would so happen, Kaur’s ass is hard to track down.

Most of her photoshoots go for something “regal” (to hilariously contrast with the merit—or lack thereof—and aesthetic of her poetry), so she’s not going to give us many sexy pics. In fact, there were hundreds of highly stylized, highly sanitized magazine photoshoot spreads of her to choose from, but precious few yielded anything for our purposes here. Still, I would never let you guys down. In the end, I was able to uncover what we needed.

Exhibit A:

We start off with a shot of Rupi Kaur’s tailbone and just a whiff of her potential posterior prowess. In this unusually candid promotional photo for her reprehensible Homebody collection (0/10 book—an ex-girlfriend ironically bought it for me during C*VID times, and I hated every second of the reading experience), Kaur’s showing off some very promising proportions. It would appear she’s in solid physical shape, and her skin’s got an alluringly even tone to it (could be the photo editing, to be fair). Her sweatpants sit well on her hips (if she had really narrow hips, they’d likely sag, and that’s no fun), and, at least to my eyes, the strategic omission of the cheeks here is enough to leave me wanting more. Sometimes, you see the lead-in to a girl’s ass—a glance, a fuzzy still, a Tinder profile pic—and simply want nothing to do with the rest of it, but ol’ Rupi’s got us on the hook here. We may not want to learn about her Home Body, but we do want to learn about her lower body.

Which takes us to:

Exhibit B:

Normally, if you can “see it from the front,” as ass-having titans like Doja Cat suggest, you’re going to like seeing said ass from the back even more. Here, there are hints in Kaur’s thigh-size that would suggest a relatively decent—if slight—ass could be hiding behind her. She’s clearly slim and not rocking major cellulite, but we’re not seeing anything too bodacious from this either. (We can rule out BBLs immediately.) She’s going for an empowered look in this shot, and she’s apparently been talked into revealing a lot more of her body than you might see from her. A rare amount of skin showing. But we like that.

This is food for speculation, my friends. The appetizer Kaur’s laid out for us. What else will she entreat us with next? We must keep digging. We must consult…

Exhibit C:

As if anticipating the arrival of this very day, Kaur was gracious enough to provide us with an extremely rare but wonderfully illuminating full-on ass shot back in 2015, when she posted this gem to Instagram.

It was eventually flagged for showing menstruation and was removed from the platform, which sparked all forms of completely level-headed and mature discourse from IG’s users, as is customary with literary and literary-adjacent topics (See: My last post on my Adele Nwankwo controversy for recent examples of this). But while this photo was removed, its legacy lives on in internet archives the world over, so I’ve been able to reproduce it for you here, gross stains and all.

So, we finally have a photo we can work with. What can we discern from it?

Let’s start with my favourite criterion: Shape. Because she’s lying down, it’s difficult to get a complete idea of the mass distribution here. This has historically been a flattering pose for women (See: Giuseppe Amisani’s “Naked Woman,” and many others), so that might be obscuring our perspective a tad. But even if we rotate the picture, we can see that there’s some attractive perkiness going on. One could picture oneself sidling up to this ass—or sliding up to it, in this instance—and being able to get two hands’ full without issue. It may not be big enough to lose oneself in, as if placing one’s head between two jiggly watermelons and going to town, but it doesn’t look droopy, so I’m liking what I’m seeing.

Surprisingly, Rupi’s booty looks relatively spherical, too. Yeah, she’s pushing it out a little for the camera (😉), but lots of girls do that in pics, so it’s whatever. We’ve got some unexpected curves here, and the roundness factor is much better than anticipated.

Hip-to waist ratio: Between Exhibits B and C, we see a stark difference. I’m gonna cut it down the middle and say hers is probably a bit on the boxier side, but not wholly unattractive.

Skin Texture: Hard to discern, and Exhibits B and A are likely edited, but we’ve seen nothing to suggest that Kaur’s skin tone is uneven, or that she’s rocking point-losing cellulite patches.

Biteability: Well, now. This is the big one. Would I, realistically, want to take a bite out of the Instapoetry demiurge’s derriere? When she’s menstruating like in Exhibit C? Absolutely not. Minus at least five points in that case. And she’s gotten it on the bed for performative purposes. How inconsiderate. But on a better day, sans crusty blood? I could be convinced. Maybe a drink or two would make me more amendable to the idea, because Rupi’s my sworn enemy, but it really wouldn’t take much more than that or the right kind of smile. So, I’m thinking she passes the “biteability” test, but not by a remarkable margin.

Moment of truth time. What do we give the ass of the one from the land of milk and honey, sun and flowers, homes and bodies? Drumroll, please!

🥁

🥁

🥁

A respectable 7/10.

Given that most female poets would come in around 4-5/10 (and this overall low grade average has been factored into my score here), this is clearly above the curve. Ultimately, while it’s hard to get a clear look at her backside, Kaur’s got enough going on to entice, and I think she knows it, which might explain why it’s so difficult to find shots of her displaying it for all us lechers to see. She loses a couple points on the shape and volume end of things, but when we look past her menstruation stunts (she’s lucky I’m fair-minded), we see she’s got at least a little something going on relative to the average would-be word-wielder.

Let’s hope she reads this and realizes she owes it to us and the greater poetry community to show off the goods more often. (Or to me, personally.)

Bonus: Overall hotness score: 6/10—fit, has all of her limbs, no visible ailments; sizeable nose, snooty expression, not much fun. Seen better, seen worse.

Who should we take a look at next? Let me know if the comments below. (Please say Anne Sexton. She’s was soooooo hot.)

(And if you’re a poet and would like your ass rated, do send pics.)

Until next time,

Poet & ass-rater extraordinaire,

Jasper Ceylon

P. S.: Here’s an illustration Rupi did of an ass that’s, sadly, better than her own one.

(Courtesy of Simon & Schuster)