For this one I have a story.
I am a huge fan of Vine. Way back in 2017, when this book came out, Vine had been dead for about a year, but YouTube Vine compilations were doing numbers. In the summer, I vividly remember having my first job and quoting vines with my coworkers. Shoutout to Iman, Ari, and Maya.
That year, my friend Courtney considered getting Milk and Vine for me as a 17th birthday present. She decided not to because she knew it had a lot of bad words and was afraid one of my little siblings would read it accidentally. Since then, I have desperately wanted to get a copy. But for reasons that elude me, it feels like "cheating" to just order a book online. So every time I went to secondhand bookstores, I would check for Milk and Vine. I wanted to capture it in the wild. But it's a surprisingly hard book to find.
Last week (on May 17th, according to my YouTube history) I was feeling bored of my regular YouTube circuit. I needed something nostalgic. I decided to watch a Vine compilation, for old times' sake. It was so fun. A blast from the past, if you will. It led me to a full blown if short-lived Vine renaissance.
Today, I found myself in a Half Price Books after work. I made a perfunctory sweep of the poetry section because, as I've expressed on Goodreads before, I love reading self-published poetry. I noticed a slim little volume with no title on the spine. I was interested--this is the kind of thing you see with self-published work all the time. I pulled it out. IT WAS MILK AND VINE. And for only $3.50. I felt like I had won the lottery!
The whole volume took me like 10 minutes to read. It's utterly stupid and the authors didn't even attempt to make the Vines look like actual Rupi Kaur poems. The formatting is terrible, and the actual Vines they chose to rip-off aren't particularly poetic. Except the one about "finna get crunk, eyebrows on fleek," which is somewhere between a modern Whitman and a modern Dickinson. The drawings are dumb and pixelated and obviously made using MS Paint in the span of an afternoon.
With that said, it's not often that a book really fills a niche like this one did. It was exactly what my soul needed. Some would call it a fortuitous circumstance but we in the know call it a "God moment." 3 stars.
(If you read this, my longest review, all the way through then comment your favorite Vine.)