Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm Sam by poet Rupikor. She's the author of three poetry collections including

milk and honey, the sun and her flowers, and most recently home body. She often writes about family, love, heartbreak, and womanhood.

Collectively, her books of poetry have sold over 10 million copies and have been translated into over 42 languages.

As we talk about at the top here, she's about to embark on an international tour where she'll perform some of her unpublished pieces alongside excerpts from each of her three collections.

But before she became a global sensation, she was just a student at the University of Waterloo,

writing poetry in-between classwork, a teenager at college trying to find her voice, which was a tall order for a woman born in Punjab, India,

before immigrating to Canada at age four. As she often says, I was always stuck between two worlds, but never fully

belonging to one. And it was on the page that she felt a sense of belonging, a way of finding herself through words.

But then, at age 21, on the heels of a viral Instagram post and the publication of milk and

honey, the whole world seemed to find her too.

This was, of course, good and bad. The attention created a career, but

it also created outspoken detractors. created a

outspoken detractors.

It is normal for writers to have critics.

It is also normal, in this day and age,

to hear from readers, both the ones who love you and the ones who don't.

Rupi has plenty in each of those camps.

What's not so normal though is for a poet to receive death threats, of which she remains a recipient to this day.

And I have to mention this as a kind of warning for listeners.

As Ruby and I discuss these sometimes violent for was to sit with Ruby and really just try to understand her last 10 years.

The power of her poetry, the pain from which it was born, and the aftermath of being in the

spotlight at age 21 21 when most of us get to make our mistakes in private.

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