Abstract

The imagery and ecofeminist thoughts of Rupi Kaur’s poems from home body (2020) should not be studied without considering all the previous generations of feminist writers whose contributions were the milestones for contemporary feminist poetry. Assuming Julia Kristeva’s (1969) notion of intertextuality, considering every text as a mosaic of quotations, a constant rewriting and reiteration, and highlighting the intermediality in Rupi Kaur’s poems, in which, the image imitates elements of the written word, this article explores intertextuality and intermediality in Rupi Kaur’s ecofeminist poems from home body (2020). The selected poems for this study are interpreted, comparing their messages from those that were postulated from previous feminist writers. Kaur’s illustrated poems writing style will be related to écriture feminine, an unusual typography used like the avant-garde futurist feminist Mina Loy’s poem “Parturition” (1914), female survival in nature as in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), the concept of God as female as in Barbara Mor & Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother (1987), the divine side that humans can acquire as in Jean Shinoda Bolen in Gods in Everyman (1989) and Goddesses in Every Woman (2004), healthy love without fear in which each one nurtures their own and another’s spiritual growth as in All About Love (2001) by bell hooks, and the connection between respecting women and nature for the natural regeneration of life as in Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies’ Ecofeminism (2014). Selected ecofeminist poems from home body (2020) will be semiotically analyzed, interpreting the symbolism of, not only the text, but also the images in the case of ekphrastic poems, to emphasize the speaker’s acceptance of natural cycles, the importance of development work in therapy to be able to have healthy relationships and recognition of a female goddess in her own self.