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Still, she’d been putting her writing on blogs for years, and kept a Tumblr before switching over primarily to Instagram. “Publishing a book was never really the intention,” she says. But she resisted, and although parental disapproval precluded her original goal of fashion school, when the time came for university, she applied to business programs. In classic immigrant-parent fashion, they encouraged her to study science. Kaur’s father, as it happens, was a truck driver: The family came to Canada from India when she was 4, and moved around in pursuit of his work before settling in Toronto’s Brampton neighborhood for her adolescence. “Some random dude or woman driving this truck is helping millions of people have the book in their hands.” “It really just takes a giant community,” she says. She had scarcely finished finalizing details - “I’m so particular about the spacing and the page and the color” - when her publisher called to tell her that 18 truckloads of paper were on the road. And, she reports, the physical copies themselves will go to press the following day. Kaur has shared photos of its design (white background, black text, geometric sunflowers) painted across her nude back.

Entertainment Weekly has published an exclusive look at the book’s cover. On the gray late-summer day when we speak in New York, the October 3 rollout of Kaur’s second collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, is well underway. So, when a young woman stops her on the way out of Think Coffee - “I love your work!” - Kaur greets her with a hug, poses for a selfie, then turns and calls back to her publicist. (In 2016, Milk and Honey beat out the next-best-selling work of poetry - The Odyssey­ - by a factor of ten.) And because Kaur’s robust social-media following (1.6 million followers on Instagram, 154,000 on Twitter) has been the engine of her success, she is accustomed to direct contact with her public. Vance, and Margaret Atwood by a margin of more than 100,000. According to BookScan totals taken near the end of September, the nearly 700,000 copies Kaur has sold put her ahead of runners-up like John Grisham, J.D. But Milk and Honey, the 25-year-old Punjabi-Canadian’s first collection of poetry, is the best-selling adult book in the U.S. Most professional poets cannot expect to be approached by fans. She looks like someone prepared to tell you convincingly that “you / are your own / soul mate,” to quote one of her poems in its entirety. Her hands rest in her pockets, her kimono-shaped jacket hangs open over a cropped black turtleneck, and she comfortably strides her realm: the realm of college freshwomen who have recently been or may soon go through breakups. Walking the Manhattan blocks near NYU, the poet Rupi Kaur wears a loose cream-colored suit and an air of easy self-assurance.