Rupi Kaur has published two books: 2015’s Milk and Honey, 2017’s The Sun and Her Flowers. Her epigrammatic verse is spare, the offspring of classical aphorism (if you’re feeling generous) and the language of self-help. The poems have a confessional, earnest manner; disarmingly full of feeling, they can be easy to dismiss. Nevertheless, Rupi Kaur, a Canadian poet who is not yet 30 years old, is the writer of the decade.

Kaur’s writing is not itself to my taste. She writes, in “the breaking”:

did you think i was a city

big enough for a weekend getaway

i am the town surrounding it

the one you’ve never heard of

but always pass through

Beyond the affectation of the lowercase letters, I find the metaphor impenetrable—the speaker is ... a suburb? Further, I’m not an especial fan of the line drawings (they look like outsider art) that often accompany her poetry.

But Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet. (Perhaps you could say the same of the novels now considered classics that were originally published serially in newspapers.) I’d argue that many of the writers currently being discussed as the most significant of the last decade write in direct opposition to the pervasive influence of the internet. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner (to name but three of our best) are interested in the single analog consciousness as a filter through which to see the world. If you think their experiment is the most important of the last 10 years, you’re probably (sorry) old.

The next generation of readers and writers views reality through a screen. Kaur, born in 1992, was 15 when the iPhone debuted. The majority of her readers have never known adulthood without that gizmo’s mitigating influence. On Instagram, Kaur doesn’t just share selfies and drawings; she publishes. Kaur’s books have sold more than 3.5 million copies, an incredible number for any poet but the more remarkable when you consider that surely some percentage of her readership has never owned one of those books.